Just about to leave, giving Marjorie some more or less likely reason for her absence, there came a tentative tap on her half-open door and Rob Roberts appeared.
With, over his arm, the ancient gardening mac lent to him on another rainy Birchester day.
Ready to go out on a self-imposed task she knew to be risking her life, the sight of Rob holding out like an offering that almost forgotten coat, set up a simmering rage in her.
‘Mrs Piddock, I’ve been meaning to bring you this for weeks, and then when I saw this morning the way it was raining, I thought I’d …’ The excuse died away into feebleness.
Harriet might have let it go. After all, Rob Roberts was full of good intentions, if nothing else. But his use of her married name, especially in front of flapping-eared Marjorie, sent her anger shooting up to break-out point.
‘Inspector, I think I told you on a previous occasion that I do not want my married name used in official circumstances. Are you accustomed to making a play with it? You assured me once that what was in your confidential files was confidential. Is that true?’
Rob Roberts’ ruddy-skinned face darkened at once in a furious blush.
Harriet pounced.
‘I can see it’s not. So, tell me, do you go round showing off your chance bit of knowledge by calling me Mrs Piddock at every possible opportunity?’
‘No. No, I never … Well, I must confess, I suppose just sometimes …’
‘Just how many times? Just when and where?’
It was hardly fair, but Rob’s weak piffling and paffling was testing her over-stretched nerves to breaking-point.
She stood waiting for his answer. He was going to get away with nothing.
‘Well, ma’am, I wasn’t exactly counting up.’ But the tiny flare died away at once. ‘I mean, I can remember talking about you in the Queen Street canteen once. It was when the newspapers had begun making a thing about you and Stop the Rot, and the lads were amused. Or, well, no, interested. They were just interested to know what your real name was. There was a bit of joking, I suppose. Someone said the papers would never have called you the Hard Detective if the name you’d used was Piddock. That raised a bit of a laugh, but I— I think that was almost all, really, ma’am.’
She checked her anger. Softy Rob Roberts was hardly worth wasting it on.
‘Oh, very well. But don’t do it again. And thanks for the coat. Just dump it on my chair, will you?’
She swung away, mind already intent on the rain-soaked towpath of the canal.
*
But at the canal — it was still raining, if more feebly: no one was about — she found she was still unsettled from the effect of that unexpected spat with Rob. Firmly pursing her lips, she made herself stop at the last bench of polite Canalside Walk, wet though it was. She swept off the excess rainwater with one hand, turned and sat, the brass knuckles that bulged her jacket pocket giving a muffled clunk as she did so. Then she fought to clear her mind.
Stupid to go to encounter a fixated madwoman unless she was in full possession of her faculties.
Five minutes did it.
She got up, brushed at the back of her damp skirt and set out at a steady pace for the blind bridge at the other end of her patrol. Taking care not to appear to be looking about her too sharply, she nevertheless gave a single quick glance into every dark nook where a would-be attacker might hide.
Would this be what Grace Brown would attempt? Simply a single vicious attack, suddenly leaping out at the woman she would in all likelihood have now seen described on dozens of newspaper bills as Top Cop. Or would Grace after all do no more than speak? Hurl words of abuse? Tell this representative of the hated police that she had had her revenge till almost the last dregs? And meant to go on till the cup was drained?
Already on this day of hovering rain clouds dusk seemed to be descending.
Chapter Seventeen
Under the louring rain clouds, seeping now only an off-and-on drizzle, Harriet went pacing the canal’s black towpath, her feet squelching slightly on the gritty surface at every step. The walls of the long-deserted warehouses at her side glistened with so much damp that they seemed to be made as much of water as of brick. The sluggish green canal itself, its filmed-over surface lightly pocked with the descending droplets, was giving off a yet sharper odour, metallic and clinging.
She stared ahead, eyes smarting, though in the mistiness it was impossible to see very far. Nothing. Nobody. Not even any of the stray cats she had seen on her last visit. She turned to look to the side. The For Sale and To Let boards, still just visible, drooped above her, less legible than ever for their coating of rain. The graffiti, too, were robbed in this sodden atmosphere of such slapdash aggressiveness as they once must have had.
Carefully she set herself, as she strode cautiously onwards, to locate and note each possible place where a lurker might be hiding.
A patch at the top of a once eight-foot wall had crumbled away. Someone might be able to scramble up on the far side and launch themselves from that vantage point. But from the towpath there was no possibility of getting up high enough to see over.
A hundred yards further on a sheet of plasterboard that had blocked a tall upper window had rotted away. Could someone inside there leap down in one single move? Would they — would tall angular Grace Brown? — land nimbly enough to be able to … To do what? There was no telling, no telling at all.
Between two of the towering warehouses she saw a narrow gap, ignored the day before. It was only four, perhaps five inches wide, but that might, she thought, be enough for gaunt Grace Brown. She peered into the inner blackness between the two sides. But there was no more to see than the walls reaching up and up, blankly.
Another window, equally high up in the wall of its building, had been protected by iron bars, and it was just possible to see, craning upwards, that all three of the centre ones had rusted right away. So would Grace be able to force herself through that gap, drop down some old length of rope, lower herself unseen? To wait in the mist for her moment.
She turned away, trudged on. Squelch, squelch, squelch.
And now abruptly she began to doubt whether she had been justified in taking the course she had. More clearly than in the first flush of daring the day before she saw how easy it would be for a determined attacker to spring down on her … from nowhere, knife in hand. The knife which the girl at the kerb where PC Venning had been attacked had seen gleaming dark with blood.
Or, somehow, might Grace come flailing a whip, already bought and hidden somewhere and now brought out. Or, if a widespread, kite-like body was launched from one of the vantage points in the tall, foreboding buildings, striking with utter unexpectedness, it could well send a victim hurtling before they knew what was happening into the thick green waters of the canal. Even to drown there.
A rat, in the last of the rain-obscured daylight, came out from underneath a tangle of brambles a few yards further on, and went, intent on its own business, to the towpath edge. Harriet was unable to prevent herself kicking a stone hard in its direction.
Then, appalled by the loudness of the noise her unthinking action had set up, she stopped in her tracks. Had she given away her exact position to a pair of straining ears underneath a shapeless blue woollen hat?
She stood listening, her own ears at full stretch. But no alien sound followed. Nothing but the tiny whispering of the soft rain.
Onwards.
A grim rusty door, also neglected in her previous march. She put out a hand and pushed at it. Resistance. Then, just as she had told herself it was securely in place beyond any possibility of its being quickly opened from inside, it suddenly gave an inch.
She stepped back as if the whole heavy slab had been ripped aside and Grace Brown revealed, knife lifted high.
But, in an instant, she told herself not to act like a weak girl. Almost any door looking out on to the towpath might, with the rusting of the empty years, have become loosened.
She advanced
again, put her shoulder to the rusty slab in front of her and pushed. Not another quarter-inch of movement.
On again. Each new door carefully checked. But at last the blind bridge came into sight through the drifting rain.
How long would it be necessary to keep up this to-and-fro march as far as the bridge and then back again to the start of the Canalside Walk? How many times over the same route? Three, four, half a dozen? At least she would allow herself no let-up until it was night dark.
The bridge.
Underneath it there was a thin patch of the path which the rain had not reached. She granted herself a short wait. Already the shoulders of her uniform jacket felt damp. How much longer, tramping in this wetting half-rain, before she was soaked through? What if she ended up catching a cold … Ridiculous. To abandon the fight with the madwoman Grace because of a few snuffles.
She stood there, half of her alert to a pitch of awareness, half of her lost in a fog of suppositions and doubts. It had been her intention to stay where she was under the bridge — it was not improbable that this would be the very place where Grace would come to her if she intended to speak before acting — for a precise ten minutes. She had even looked at her watch as she stepped into the shelter noting the exact time.
But, as the minutes went by and there was no sound except the minuscule pattering of the now slightly harder rain, she became more and more prey to unaccustomed doubts.
Had it really been stupid not to have arranged for any sort of back-up? There were men and women in the Force highly skilled in street observation. One of them might after all have been able to keep her in view undiscovered by Grace. Or she could have had a radio on open channel easily concealed under her jacket. And then, if the sound of a struggle suddenly came to not-so-distant ears, muffled grunts, a half-cry, a plain shout, nearby officers could be on the scene within a minute or two, within seconds almost.
Thinking of the whole situation, wasn’t it that she had chosen to behave, not like the hard detective she had earned the reputation of being, but like a silly new aide to CID risking all in a solitary bid to justify some ill-conceived theory of their own?
Had she … ?
Startled into consciousness, not by some sudden surreptitious sound, but by the idiocy of the thoughts she had allowed to run repetitively on in her head, she looked rapidly all round, further along the canal towards Chapeltown from which Grace might only now be coming, across the murky water to the opposite bank, back behind to the grey mistiness of this towpath. Nothing. No one. Not a sound.
She looked at her watch.
Good God, twenty-two minutes vanished away.
About turn. Set off into the rain again. To hell with dampening shoulders. Ready on the instant for sudden attack, for a harshly croaking voice calling out Top Cop, Top Cop?
Tramp, tramp, tramp. Squelch, squelch.
And nothing ahead, only now plain signs of dusk under the dark grey, rain-oozing clouds. Another rat, this time scampering back into its lair under a high, grime-engrained wall.
Any other sound? Any give-away sound? Grace could, as she had envisaged earlier, have come here beforehand. She could have been watching, her crazed, glinting, marble-hard good eye at some crack in a wall somewhere, a quarter-inch gap between rust-brown metal door and slimed-wood doorpost, watching and noting. And now ready to come out. With the knife? With spitting incomprehensible words and curses?
Then, when it came, it was, despite all imaginings, almost entirely in an unexpected form.
The grey curtain of mist ahead, hardly lit by the very last of the daylight now, thickened to reveal a solid figure. And it was Grace Brown. There could be no mistaking her. Tall enough, thinly intense, a long greenish woollen dress clinging to her spare frame, much as her distant cousin, haystack-placid Mrs Studley, had described her arriving at the former police house at Westholme. And with, on her head, final proof if more proof were needed, a formless blue woollen hat.
Where had she come from? Obvious answer. From one of the places noted on the way to the blind bridge. A block, jammed against that rusty metal door, pulled away? A careful climb down from the crumbled wall, from any of the open-to-the-weather high windows? Less likely, but not impossible. Or, rake-thin as she seemed to be, standing legs apart, body leaning a little forward from the waist, had she been able to slide through that five-inch gap between the two huge warehouses?
But no matter. Grace Brown was here. Materialized out of the soaking mist. A ghost. But a real ghost. A ghost intent on killing?
‘I bin waiting fer you.’
Harriet paused for an instant, gathering herself up.
‘Have you, Grace? So you know who I am?’
‘Top Cop. Top Cop daring to come face-to-face with Cop Killer. That’s who you are. An’ that’s what you’re going to regret before long. You’ll regret it all right.’
Harriet slipped her hand into the pocket of her dampened jacket, to feel with the tips of her fingers the solid weight of her illicit set of brass knuckles. Wrong, of course, to use them. But if she found herself at Grace’s mercy … as well she might. Then one swift blow and the madwoman would lie unconscious on the grit-black path. And, once secured, even before summoning assistance on the mobile, splash, the heavy set of knuckles lost for ever in the muddy depths of the canal.
But, for the moment at least, there was no sign that the mist-shrouded figure some twenty yards off had in her hand the knife that had killed PC Titmuss and nearly been the end of PC Venning.
So knuckles stay where they are. Out of sight.
But approach. Softly. One step forward, and wait.
Squelch. The step taken.
Nineteen yards away now. Grace seemed not to have taken in that step forward. Standing there silently and menacingly erect.
Another step. Taking more care than before to make the least possible noise. No movement from the distant, silent figure. One more step. Eighteen separating yards now. Less. And …
‘Stay where you are. Yer don’t think Grace Brown’s just going to let herself be catched? Not till she’s done all what she ‘as to do, she ain’t. And not after neither.’
‘Why not, Grace?’
Try the soft soap, little chance though there was it would work. But if it gained another yard, another minute …
‘Why not? Because of what you police done ter me. Killed my babby. Killed her ‘fore she could see the light of day, the little pet. Oh, yes, they deserved to die, those police that done that. Life for life, that’s what it says in the Good Book. An’ a life for a life I took. That stupid copper, standing there a-puffing at ’is cigarette. An’ that girl, no better than what she ought ter be from what I was hearing going about with me dishes in that canteen. She should of gone, too. It were right. Eye for eye. An’ didn’t I lose the sight of me eye when that fat sergeant o’ police poked his elbow in me face? So that was right, too. That was what made me lose me babby, and it were right the foreigney girl should pay fer it.’
Despite that sharp Stay where you are, three sliding movements across the gritty, rain-soaked surface of the path had gone apparently unnoticed.
Time to put a reasoned view.
‘But, Grace, even if it was right to have struck at those two, at PC Titmuss who had done nothing to you himself, at that girl Rukshana Syed you blinded and pushed to her death, even if those deaths were, in your eyes, right, were the rest of them? You should have stopped then, Grace. It wasn’t right to go on. It wasn’t right.’
‘Grace knows what’s right. Grace is right. You police were wrong. Grace is right.’
No use arguing there. The direct true course the only one.
‘Grace Brown,’ her voice clear and ringing over the still green water beside her as she stepped forward. ‘I am arresting you on suspic—’
But the necessary, law-imposed phraseology blown away.
At the word arresting the statue-still figure in the mist was transformed in an instant to an oncoming, shouting, screaming, arms-wh
irling dervish. Rushing forward full-out.
‘Whore of Babylon. Trick— Tricking …’
But Harriet, ready for just this, ducked sideways and then caught her by both her flailing arms.
No knife. So no need for anything more than the well-tested holds of the training school gym.
The face close up against her own. Sharp blue-button eyes, the right one seen now as unmoving, glazed. A spray of harsh spittle.
‘I shouldn’t ha’ listened. Shouldn’t have paid no heed to them posters. Challenge — Top Cop — Challenge!
The writhing arms hard to hold.
Harriet swiftly changed her grip, brought her weight to bear fully down.
‘But I won’t be got. You ain’t the one as … Stripe for stripe. I’ll do it yet.’
A bony knee suddenly driven with full force into Harriet’s stomach. A street fighter’s trick. Unexpected.
Harriet heard the squeal of her own outforced breath. She heaved herself further forward, teeth gritted in a grimace of pain.
But there was no winning.
One more wild writhing motion, and Harriet felt the thin arms between her tightened fingers beginning to slip away. Another blow. This time, less well aimed and from the head in its blue woollen hat. But enough. Hard into the nose. And she fell.
Momentarily blinded by tears, she knew she had lost her. The knife. If Grace got out her killing knife she would be finished. And, flat on the ground, the brass knuckles, even if she could get them out quickly enough, useless.
Fool. Idiot.
In desperation she lashed out with her leg.
And felt it make contact. Saw Grace’s long frame above her stagger.
She flung herself forwards into a half-upright crouch. For a moment they faced each other.
Grace, she saw, did have the knife in her hand now.
The Hard Detective Page 16