Last Detective

by Thomas, Leslie

  ‘I’m not free! I’m promised!’ Davies howled desperately from the clutch. She pulled his head violently away by the hair. His senses were revolving. He knew he had the horn.

  ‘Don’t you like them?’ she demanded. ‘Not good enough for you?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he pleaded. ‘They’re nice, Ena. Really super. Big. But Ena…Put them away!’

  Her reply was to smash his face down into her bosom again, grabbing the back of his hair and wiping him up and down as though he were some kind of hand mop. She released one hand and it dived to his trousers. With a cry of triumph she caught his enclosed penis in a fierce grip and, amid it all, he suddenly knew why Dave Boot had screeched out all those years ago. It was an iron grip.

  His hands were thrashing about like a penguin off balance. One set of fingers found the control panel of the lift. He pressed everything he could find. Three times the lift went up and three times down while he struggled with her hunger and wrath. They were thrown off balance against the metal sides and then on the floor. From that position like boxers who have delivered simultaneously damaging punches they gazed at each other. Her white balloon breasts were still swinging from her front, their reddened nipples glaring resentfully. It was nothing to the fierce look in her eyes. She came at him with her nails and her handbag. He tried to rise and she flung him against the wall. His panicked fingers found the buttons and the lift dropped spectacularly, throwing them over again as it bounced on the ground floor. This time Davies scrambled up first. He found the ‘Door Open’ button and pressed it furiously.

  The door opened and outside was his dog, Kitty, a great wet-matted mound of hound, howling terribly. With unerring instinct it had sensed the battle and, rousing from its stupor, had lumbered from the car and pounded up the hill. Now, with the same unerring instinct, it fiercely attacked Davies, knocking him to the ground, snarling in his face and finally biting him on the arm. Davies collapsed. The dog saw what it had done and leapt on his prostrate body howling apparently with remorse at its error.

  Ena Lind, weeping from every pore, shovelled her breasts back into her garments as she pounded violently up the concrete stairs. Doors were beginning to open and lit squares jerked into windows but it did not stop her sniping from the first landing.

  ‘Serve you bloody right, you sexless berk!’ she cried. ‘I hope the bloody dog screws you!’

  ‘Please lady,’ muttered Davies lying against a cold wall. ‘Don’t put ideas into his head.’

  Chapter Nine

  Among his unnumbered shortcomings as a detective was the fact that he neither harboured suspicion nor cultivated caution in the appropriate proportions at the important moment. He reflected deeply on these absent traits during his vacant days in hospital following the violent attack on him by two men using a dustbin.

  The invitation to the attack was lying on the front door mat that night when Davies reached ‘Bali Hi’ after so narrowly fighting off Ena Lind and his own dog. The dog’s teeth, soft and mouldering fortunately, like the remainder of the creature, had impressed his arm but it was the fiery memory of Ena’s wanton breasts which clutched his thoughts more deeply on his journey to Mrs Fulljames’s front door. He had permitted himself a long medicinal draught of scotch from a bottle which he kept secretly in the Lagonda before garaging the car and Kitty for the night. Then, before his hazy eyes they appeared—those breasts, floating like cream, pointed balloons, wobbling just beyond reach, disturbing and hot in the chilly night.

  His hands felt pulpy as he reached for his key outside the door as he considered once more what a narrow escape from rape he had experienced. Calamities he knew like old familiars but being raped was something new and hardly the thing for a Metropolitan Police detective constable to have to admit even to himself.

  The note on the doormat had to be taken out and read by the street light, for lights-out in Mrs Fulljames’s house meant what it said. Under the lamp Davies perceived the pencilled invitation ‘For important information be by the canal bridge at 23.45 hours.’

  He wondered if the message could have come in some roundabout fashion from Father Harvey. Although that conclusion did not fit the twenty-four-hour timing. He did not think the Roman Catholic Church had yet got around to writing ‘23.45 hours’. ‘After Vespers’, perhaps.

  Nevertheless the note seemed frank enough. Somebody trying to help him. Somebody with information to give or to sell. The thought of a trap or an ambush never occurred to him which, to some considerable extent, was why his professional career was so generally scattered with physical injury. Davies always thought the best of people.

  He perceived that the perspex of his watch which that night he had remembered to wear had been dented and starred in his struggle in Ena Lind’s lift. He held it under the street lamp and, having distinguished the hands from the cracks, he saw that he had only five minutes to fulfil the rendezvous by the canal. He would need to walk, for, having put the Lagonda away, he knew that neither the car nor the dog liked to be disturbed once they had been stabled for the night. He turned up his deep damp collar once more and strode towards the High Street and the sloping alley that led to the canal.

  They saw him coming as soon as he began passing the illuminated shop windows in the main street. They had been arguing in criminal undertones about the wording of the message they had dropped through his door. One thought that it was a mistake to say ‘23.45 hours’, but the other held that because it looked more official it did not engender so much suspicion. No felon, he argued, would be suspected of using twenty-four-hour divisions. It was a clever detail.

  The thought had come firmly to Davies that it might be some sort of official communication, the time quotation being the basis of this consideration. Perhaps after all, it was Father Harvey, using man-made time in his off-duty life. He remained with the notion while he turned between the pawnshop and the massage parlour, both closed and cold, and entered the alley. The ambushers began to move in then, closing behind him, tiptoeing, the dustbin suspended between them as if they were some fairy refuse collectors. Davies heard nothing until the swift swishing sound and a stunning clang as the dustbin was turned over his head and he was engulfed in a dark, closed, curry-smelling world with his head and shoulders jammed firmly and his hands flipping helplessly. They could not have found a better fit if they’d measured him.

  He revolved in confusion and alarm, the darkness and the stench revolting and revolving with him. Then they went into the next stage of the attack, producing pick-axe handles from the verge of the allotment fence and belabouring the dustbin with them. Davies had never been so hurt or so frightened. The blows battered and rained on the metal, smashing him from side to side so that his head clanged against the sides like a clapper of a voluminous bell. His attackers, after the first close flurry of blows, and knowing how helpless he was, stood back and took good long swings at him, denting the tin walls with each violent blow. They belaboured his hands too, crushing them to his sides, but not his legs. That was for later.

  Davies pirouetted like a large ballet dancer. Separate from all he could feel his ankles turning like cogged wheels. Each man dealt him a final blow. They then caught him by the sides, took the dead weight, and dragged him grunting toward the canal. One of the pair retained his pick-axe handle. They stood Davies on the bank of the canal and while one held his dropping body steady the other took a final cruel swing and brought the wooden weapon violently across the backs of his legs. He toppled forward and went gratefully into the canal. The two men left, collecting the other pick-axe handle on the way. They might need them again.

  It was Father Harvey who heard the discordant campanology of the blows upon the dustbin (others did too, but it was not a neighbourhood where people, in general, investigated disturbances the same night.) The priest had been sitting late in his study, in thought spiced with modicum of prayer, studying a plan for a do-it-yourself confessional box. The arson of the former box had caught both the insurance company and the ecclesiasti
cal authorities in a niggardly mood and the weeks without a place to unload sins had resulted in an accumulating backlog of guilt throughout his parish. He was thus considering erecting a temporary structure himself and was biting his clerical lip over the plans when he heard the clanging of the smitten dustbin. He went to the door of his house, ascertained the direction of the resounding metal and returned to get his fishing rod. It was truly an excuse for being abroad late at night, and it could be a handy weapon.

  He heard the heavy splash as he reached the canal bank and looked and saw the two hurrying shapes by the humped bridge. He walked quickly and bravely in that direction and reached the bridge in time to see a curved flank of the dustbin, illuminated by the bridge lamp, gradually submerging like some secret submarine. His first thought was merely that some rowdy youths had dropped it into the black water as a joke, but before he turned away he took a final look, and saw a pair of trousers and attached boots break the surface surrounded by glugging bubbles.

  Father Harvey had, in his youth in Ireland, been one of the best swimmers in Dingle, County Kerry (not as distinguished as it might appear since his contemporaries were fishing lads who preferred to keep a hull between themselves and the water and never went into the sea, except by accident). Now he did not hesitate to take off his encumbering black priest’s gown and his black patent leather dancing pumps which he wore as slippers. He stood there in his vest and long underpants. Then came the hesitation. He looked over the parapet of the bridge to make absolutely sure that he was not too late, and would be jumping for nothing. He saw the same trousers and bobbing boots, sighed a prayer, crossed himself and then eyes closed, plunged clumsily into the cold canal.

  Dropping blindly, he struck the dustbin with a spectacular splash and clang, legs wide like a knight leaping on to the back of a steed. It sank at once with Davies trapped within it and the priest astride. They gurgled down into the cold, dank tunnel of water. The icy blow took Father Harvey’s breath away. Then the stench of it surged up his large dilated nostrils. But his flailing arms immediately caught the projecting legs and he hung on to them. He knew that once he let go he would never find them again in that awful place.

  The priest burst to the surface. His snatched prayer of gratitude was truncated by a full mouthful of canal, which he spat away before launching himself for the bank mercifully only a yard away, towing the dustbin and its contents behind him. He was a strong priest and—more than that—determined, unwilling, despite his supplications, to wait for Providence to perform miracles on his behalf. He reached the edge and hung on and shouted at the height of his soaked voice. His cry was heard by a man sitting through the night, guarding his allotment (there had been much rustling on the vegetable patches in the area since the rise in shop prices and the publicity given to the court case involving the vegetable robber). The man hurried to the bank. He was, fortuitously, a strong man, used to digging the London clay, and he eventually pulled Father Harvey from the canal. Together they then got hold of Davies’s dustbin and brought that to dry land. They pulled it away and Father Harvey emitted a wet gasp when he saw who was inside. ‘Dangerous,’ he said addressing the unconscious face, running with fresh blood since there was now no water to wash it away. ‘Dangerous, what in the name of God are you up to?’

  Father Harvey went to visit Davies in Park Royal Hospital, three days later when they had completed pumping him through, stitched his wounds and opened his eyes as far as possible.

  ‘It’s no wonder the water went straight through you,’ remarked the priest eyeing him. ‘You’re full of bloody holes.’ He glanced guiltily sideways down the ward because of his swear-words.

  ‘I leak all over,’ agreed Davies dreamily.

  ‘Ah, you’re a strong, tough man, I’ll give you that,’ said Father Harvey. ‘I thought we would be preparing for your wake. Even on the canal bank I got to wondering what religion you pursued. I didn’t know, but I gave you the last rites in case. One thing about us men of God, we know our rites.’

  Davies attempted a smile. ‘It would have been more to the point if you’d tried the kiss of life,’ he remarked.

  ‘Every man to his calling,’ replied the priest, unruffled. ‘It’s fine to see you’re still with us on this side, anyway. I wouldn’t guarantee you much of a future over there, beyond, you know. Not being a policeman!’

  ‘If it wasn’t for you happening to be out swimming at that time of night I would be most certainly beyond,’ said Davies. He moved his hand gratefully towards the priest who, glancing privily around the ward first, patted it with his own.

  ‘A very nasty business,’ said Father Harvey. ‘I suppose the police force must be combing the area, whatever that may mean.’

  ‘They’ll hardly think to give it a scratch,’ said Davies with certainty. ‘An attack on a copper—particularly this copper—is nothing special. The Inspector, Yardbird, probably had a good laugh and asked the lads to watch for anything suspicious on their way home from work.’

  ‘Charity rarely begins at home,’ agreed the priest. ‘Do you know who might have done it?’

  ‘I’ve got a fair idea,’ said Davies, a light coming from his reduced eyes. ‘All I have to do is find them…him.’

  ‘It’s a wonder they didn’t crack your skull even before drowning you. It must be even thicker than I thought.’

  Davies tried a bigger smile but it hurt him all over his face. ‘One of my copper colleagues tells me the bin came from the Indian Restaurant,’ he said. ‘It had a lining of dried curry. Tough stuff that curry, especially from that dump. It saved my life.’ He regarded Father Harvey through his bruises and stitches. ‘You’re a good bloke,’ he said genuinely. ‘Thanks. When I’ve got this lot over with I’ll find out who burned down your confessional box.’

  ‘I’m thinking of building a temporary structure,’ the priest told him. ‘There’s a nasty backlog of unforgiven sins piling up, and my superiors are not being very sympathetic, nor is the insurance company. If you happen to know of any reasonable wood lying around that I might make some use of perhaps you’ll tell me. I saw some very decent planks in the yard of Swindell’s the undertakers, but I’m not sure that would morally be quite correct. Sitting there tight surrounded by the best cedar, would make me feel uncomfortable. I’ll be long enough in my coffin when I truly get there.’

  ‘Better than being scuttled in a refuse bin,’ said Davies. ‘Did you run up any expenses, by the way? You know, with your clothes being waterlogged and everything?’

  The priest shook his head. ‘My underwear was dry by the morning. I put it over the church boiler. The only charge will be for the dry cleaning of my clerical gown which I threw off before throwing myself into the canal. Unfortunately I tossed it into a particularly filthy puddle. I’ll send you the bill. At the cleaners they always charge it as a maxi-coat.’

  Mrs Fulljames and Doris came through the door of the ward and stood there in plastic truculence; one pink and one sky blue crinkly and crackly raincoat with transparent overshoes of the same synthetic material tied about their ankles, imprisoning their feet like specimens. They remained stiffly at the door, the raindrops dripping from their gulleys and gutters like melting ice. They examined Davies at that distance, squinting their eyes and screwing up their faces, backing their heads away, as though trying to get a true perspective of his injuries. He sat taut and propped in bed, wondering why they had come.

  ‘Fine bloody mess you look,’ snorted Mrs Fulljames from the door.

  ‘Yes, a fine mess,’ confirmed Doris loyally.

  Davies believed he heard Mrs. Fulljames snap her fingers and the two plastic dragons advanced on him, their scales creaking as they strode. But he was spared.

  A voice croaked at the distant end of the room and caught his landlady’s attention. ‘Oh, just look, Doris,’ she said in a pleased way. ‘There’s that polite Mr Wellington, who used to be our milkman.’

  ‘So it is. Mr Wellington,’ agreed Doris. When she smiled Davies so
metimes thought he caught a distant glimpse of her youth. But it was soon gone. ‘Wonder why he’s in?’

  ‘Let’s go and see the poor soul,’ said Mrs Fulljames. She wheeled stiffly, luffing like a sea-soaked sailing barge and made for the extreme end of the ward. Doris, with not so much as a splintered glance at her husband, followed obediently. They waved wet waves to Mr Wellington as they went. Davies astonished himself by experiencing a touch of jealousy. He eased himself up in his bed and saw the milkman sitting up in real excitement and anticipation.

  It was almost ten minutes before they returned. ‘Such an interesting man, that,’ chuffed Mrs Fulljames, as though that was an entire and acceptable excuse for their divergence. ‘He’s so polite, isn’t he, Doris? And he’s been everywhere.’

  ‘Milkmen usually have,’ observed Davies painfully.

  Doris stared at her husband’s dented and stitched countenance. ‘He’s eaten your Smarties,’ she said bluntly, as though wanting to get it over with. ‘I brought you some Smarties, but Mr Wellington’s had them.’

  Once more Davies felt illogically hurt. He scowled and the pain told him not to do it again. ‘Thanks for bringing them anyway,’ he muttered. ‘It’s the thought, really, I suppose.’

  ‘Of course it is!’ interpolated Mrs Fulljames extravagantly. She hovered across his sheets now as though enjoyably anticipating performing an operation on him.