Last Detective

by Thomas, Leslie

  There was no sign or notice of the way he ought to follow. He was within a few feet of the woman, enthralled by a few daisies she had dug from the flower bed with the prongs of a table fork. ‘Oh, excuse me, madam,’ Davies said.

  Her face came around first, old but ageless, bright-eyed. It was followed by the muzzle of a gun, a pistol of nasty aspect, which she held secretly against her blue overall. ‘Stick ’em up,’ she demanded quietly.

  Davies raised his hands above his head. The blood seemed to run down his arms and into his stomach. He stared at the gun. It looked real. ‘I saw you,’ she said rising slowly from her knees. ‘I detected you coming in.’

  ‘Oh…oh, yes,’ nodded Davies stiffly. He felt, arms up as he was, that his trousers might fall. ‘I’ve come to see the superintendent, Doctor Longton. Do you know…?’

  ‘Keep ’em up,’ she warned grimly. ‘And walk.’

  He looked wildly about him. There was no other person in the entire garden. It was as though it had all been prepared as a trap for him. She nudged him with the gun and he began to march with his hands held above his ears.

  She nudged him through another archway and into a stone corridor, wide, with windows and doors on either side. A man came out of an office with a clipboard in his hand. Davies tried to say something but the man walked by studying the clipboard and taking no heed of the gunwoman or the man she pushed before her. Other people appeared, some in white coats, but his extraordinary progress along the corridor aroused no interest whatever. Some actually wished his captor ‘Good morning’. Eventually they turned into a large hall where a physical training class was taking place. An instructor was demonstrating a bend to thirty or so people who watched and then bent with dedication. The woman marched Davies right across the floor at gunpoint and still nobody made a mention of it. Eventually they arrived in front of a short tubby woman with a steady, red face.

  ‘Matron,’ said the gunwoman. ‘An intruder. He wants Doctor Longton.’

  The matron hardly glanced at Davies with his hands still hovering in the air. ‘He’s in his office,’ she said. ‘Hurry and you’ll catch him.’

  The muzzle of the gun banged into the small of Davies’s back and he was forced to jog across the floor to a further corridor and the entrance to an office. The gunwoman reached around and knocked at the door with the butt of the weapon. A pleasant voice, the voice of someone happy with his work, called out: ‘Come in, come in.’

  Relief had replaced consternation in Davies by now and he stood sheepishly with his arms still up as his captor ushered him into the room. Dr Longton smiled understandingly. ‘Ah, you came in the back way, I see,’ he said. Then to the woman. ‘It’s all right, Marie. I’ll take over. Thank you very much.’

  The woman went out without a word. Davies said: ‘Can I put my arms down now?’ He lowered them. ‘That looked like a real gun to me.’

  ‘Oh it was,’ the Superintendent said. ‘She needs it. We tried giving her a toy but she wouldn’t accept it. So we got that one, and she’s happy with that. We’ve taken a few parts out of it, of course, and she has no access to any ammunition. It’s her status symbol, if you understand.’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ blinked Davies. He introduced himself and they shook hands. ‘It was just a bit of a shock, that’s all. Unexpected.’

  ‘We expect the unexpected here,’ said the doctor as though that was the limit of the discussion. ‘You’ve come to see Mr Fennell?’

  ‘Yes, I went to see his wife…’

  ‘It’s a pity she doesn’t come to see him,’ said the other man. ‘He misses her terribly.’

  Davies nodded unhappily, knowing that he was treading where he would prefer not to walk. ‘She said she won’t come,’ he said.

  Dr Longton scratched his nose. He was slim and gently bent like a feather. ‘A thousand pities,’ he said.

  ‘I think she found it too much for her,’ said Davies. ‘The whole thing.’

  ‘Most people do,’ said Dr Longton. ‘But not as much as the patients.’

  ‘Yes, I can understand that,’ nodded Davies.

  ‘Mr Fennell is not too bad now, though. He has very good days. It seems to be arrested. His delusions of grandeur, being royalty and suchlike, are less pronounced. I think he would like to see you, Mr Davies. And if you get a chance perhaps you could get his wife to come and visit him. It would make his life much brighter.’

  Davies nodded uncertainly. ‘I’ll go and see her again,’ he promised. ‘I’ll see what she says.’

  ‘Good. I’ve arranged for you to see Mr Fennell away from the ward. If the others saw you talking they would all want to tell you their troubles. They became stored-up, as it were, here. There’s a small consulting room where you can talk.’ He hesitated. ‘Without prying too much into police business,’ he ventured ‘Would it be possible for you to tell me something of what this is about? I’m thinking of the patient, you understand.’

  Davies nodded. ‘Of course. I see that. Actually it’s a murder inquiry. It’s not quite so dramatic as it sounds because it happened twenty-five years ago. Mr Fennell was a police constable in the area at the time and had some part in the inquiries.’

  ‘You want to see if he remembers,’ said the doctor. He seemed to be considering it. ‘I’d be grateful if you could tread carefully,’ he said. ‘Be very careful with him. If he doesn’t remember I’d be glad if you’d call it a day and not press him.’

  ‘I will,’ promised Davies gently. ‘I don’t want to mess anything up.’

  ‘Thank you. And don’t make it too protracted, if you don’t mind. It’s a big day for him, you know, having a visitor, and it could be emotionally tiring.’ He stopped and thought out the points he had made. ‘Right,’ he concluded. ‘I’ll take you along there.’

  They went on a short journey as near to a nightmare as Davies had been in waking hours. Each door they reached was double-locked and unlocked, each corridor seemed to go deeper and deeper into the throes of the building. He heard screams and shouts, and faces, faces pallid with amazement appeared at side windows as they walked by. Eventually they reached a door set apart from the others.

  ‘He’s in here, waiting,’ said Longton quietly. ‘Something I forgot to ask, Mr Davies. Does he actually know you?’

  ‘No,’ replied Davies. ‘We’ve never met. He had left the police before I arrived in the division.’

  ‘I see,’ said the doctor. He knocked courteously and a voice inside bade them anxiously, ‘Come in.’ Even from behind Davies knew that Longton was smiling as he entered. He could tell by the wrinkles at the nape of his neck. An ashen-faced, ancient, shaking man sat on a wooden chair by at plain table. ‘Mr Davies to see you, Mr Fennell,’ announced Dr Longton.

  Fennell stood irresolutely. His face trembled and, as though it could not hold them, finally cracked into gigantic tears. ‘Oh, thank you for coming,’ he said to Davies, holding out his hands. ‘My old friend, thank you for coming.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Madame Tarantella Phelps-Smith, High Class Gipsy Fortune Teller, was a flitting figure in the town. Over the years less had been seen of her, not merely because she made her outdoor appearances infrequently, but because she seemed to be getting smaller as her life went on. Beryl Adams, as she was before she was touched magically by a Gipsy Soothsayer at a fair on Hackney Marshes, had once lent an exotic touch to the labouring surroundings of the district. She flowed about in robes that moved like a coloured sea. She had rings on her fingers and bells on the long curly toes of her embroidered shoes. Davies had always thought of her as a tall person; even her face seemed to be tall, a high forehead and a deep chin; her eyes were vertically elongated, her eyebrows aloft and arched and her mouth a perpetual upright oval as though she received an amazement every moment of her life.

  She used to be seen in various parts of the town dispensing ready magic and telling the futures of the inhabitants who, in that hard and gritty place always hoped that things might improve. But the years
had dimmed her eye and her ambitions and by the time she came to Davies’s professional notice she contained her outside forays to dashes to the off-licence and the fish-and-chip shop. By this time her back had bent, her tall arms hung and swung almost to the pavement, and her shoulders were forever hunched.

  ‘It’s the years I’ve spent leaning over this bloody crystal ball,’ she complained to Davies. ‘It’s a risk of the job I suppose. Like miners get that disease, whatever it’s called, soothsayers get bent backs and hunched shoulders.’

  ‘You get a lot of business?’

  ‘No, but I have to practise, otherwise you get rusty.’

  ‘Policemen get flat feet,’ he sympathized. ‘And a pain in the neck. I went to see Fred Fennell yesterday.’

  Madame Tarantella seemed unsurprised. ‘Fred Fennell,’ she mused as though only days had passed since she last read his palm while they lay unclothed in her patchwork bed. ‘Dear Fred. How is he? Getting old now, I suppose.’

  ‘He’s keeping pace with the rest of us,’ agreed Davies. Her room was above a men’s plain outfitters, Mr Blake’s, who had clothed half the working force of the district, mostly by weekly instalments. As they sat there, Davies could hear the sturdy clothes being moved from their racks which were fixed just below Madame Tarantella’s floor. Madame Tarantella herself sat in what she called her driving seat, the little bentwood chair seeming to cling like a child around her skirts. The room was professionally dim with drapes and tassels on the curtains and the signs of the Zodiac on illuminated panels around the wall. On the table with the crystal ball was a used coffee cup, an ashtray full of massacred stubs and a copy of the daily paper open and marked at the racing page.

  ‘You ought to be on a winner every time,’ observed Davies, nodding at the newspaper. He was sitting in the client’s chair, his overcoat opened because of the closeness of the small room.

  ‘Horses? No damn fear,’ she sighed. ‘If I could see the winners, I wouldn’t be sitting here now, Dangerous. When I try to focus it on Epsom or Sandown Park it turns rogue and gives me one of the back markers. A gift’s a gift but it won’t get you rich at fifty-pence a gaze. The only fortune that comes up here is somebody else’s.’ She looked at him speculatively. ‘You wouldn’t like to have a consultation while you’re here, would you?’

  Davies smiled solemnly. ‘I’ve already met two dark mysterious men,’ he said. ‘I’ve still got the scars.’

  ‘You’ll meet them again, beware,’ she warned abruptly. ‘But you will be saved by a beast. Do you have a police dog?’

  ‘Not a police dog. I’ve got Kitty, a damn ratbag of a thing that spends its life sleeping in my car.’

  She nodded, ‘Ah yes, I’ve seen the beast. You should give it a wash sometime. Look after it, Dangerous. You will need it.’ She seemed tempted to take a quick plunge into the crystal but she resisted. ‘And what did Fred Fennell have to say?’

  ‘You…you knew him pretty well a few years ago? So he told me.’

  ‘Oh come on, Dangerous,’ she replied good-humouredly. ‘You and me are in the same basic business. Knowing about people. You know he was my lover or you wouldn’t be in this room now. But it was donkey’s years ago.’

  ‘He’s not so bad…physically. In the circumstances.’

  ‘It’s a mental hospital then,’ she said quickly. ‘I felt he was ill, but I didn’t get a fix on a mental hospital.’

  ‘Well he is. At Bedford.’

  ‘Oh my. Poor Fred. He was always the big virile policeman, you know. I’ve seen him standing in this room many a time wearing nothing but his hobnailed boots. A fine sight.’

  ‘I bet,’ said Davies. He wanted her to go on.

  ‘What about that wife of his then?’ she said. ‘Cruel bitch, she was. She had a thing about animals. She’d go out and poison cats and dogs at night. The family had to use force to keep her away from the zoo. Apparently she was in somebody’s house once and she tried to strangle their goldfish.’

  ‘That’s not easy,’ conceded Davies. ‘Well she must have reformed because she feeds foxes now—on beef sandwiches. Unless she spreads poison with the butter. I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘Dreadful woman. Fred used to weep about her. I liked him, Dangerous. But I couldn’t see a future for us together.’

  ‘If you couldn’t, who could?’ acknowledged Davies. ‘Do you remember, years ago, the case of Celia Norris. She vanished.’

  ‘Oh her. That girl. Yes, I remember, I’ve still got her bicycle.’

  Davies almost fell off the chair. Sweat burst out all over his face. He stared at her. She was idly running her tall fingers over the crystal ball. ‘Her bicycle?’ he managed to say.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said practically. ‘It’s down in my shed somewhere. There’s a lot of junk in there but I know it’s there.’

  Davies tried to keep himself calm. ‘How…how did it come to be here?’ he asked forcing his voice to be slow. ‘How?’

  ‘Fred brought it in,’ she said simply. ‘There’s no harm in telling you now. If he’s in the bin they can’t touch him and I bet you’d find it hard to arrest me.’

  ‘I won’t arrest you,’ Davies promised desperately. ‘Nobody will, ever. Just tell me.’

  ‘It was the time of that Norris girl thing. The same night as she disappeared. Fred was up here. I remember it very well. He used to pop up for half an hour or sometimes more when he was on duty. He used to be in the little van that went all around the streets, with another policeman, and they used to arrange so that one of them could hop off for a while. They would take turns. The other chap used to go somewhere, I don’t know where, and Fred used to come up here. It started off when he came in to have his future foretold—well, that’s what he said. It was his excuse for getting to know me. I was young and rather handsome then. And once he’d given me his hand to hold professionally, I found I couldn’t let go of it. It happens, Dangerous, even to us who have extra powers.’

  Davies nodded solemnly. He wanted to dance around the room with her but he kept his seat in the chair.

  ‘He’d had a few drinks that particular night. Been to some police booze-up, again on the quiet because he was supposed to be on duty. They were devils in those days. I wouldn’t have trusted a policeman, believe me, except Fred of course.’

  ‘Terrible lot,’ agreed Davies. He did not want to stop her. She was staring at the racing page as if trying to conjure some vision of Mr Fred Fennell from Tipster’s Selections from Market Rasen.

  ‘Yes,’ she went on eventually. ‘That night he’d had a few and he only came up for a while. Then he went down and not long afterwards he came back with the bike. It’s been here ever since. All these years.’

  Davies said: ‘Why did he bring it here?’

  ‘Well he had just found it. He didn’t know whose it was, of course. It was lying by the wall of the cemetery. He’d come across it lying in the grass and he’d brought it here. He was quite clever, Fred, for an ordinary police constable who never got promoted. Or crafty. His idea was to keep it here and then if ever he was found out, you know, if they discovered him here or his wife got suspicious and followed him or had him watched, then he could say he had come after a report of a missing bicycle being found. I would say that I’d found it and hand it over and no one would be any the wiser. It was just a sort of safeguard for him being in here, see.’

  ‘But didn’t he realize whose bike it was?’

  ‘No. Of course not. He thought it was just a bike—any bike. Lost or thrown away by somebody who had stolen it. It wasn’t until later, when the hue and cry was on, that he realized that it belonged to the girl, Norris. And by that time it was too late. He was too scared to take it in.’

  Davies hardly trusted his mouth to open. ‘Tarantella,’ he said pushing his hand across the table and resting it on hers. Her hand felt cold, dead. ‘Can I see it? The bike?’

  ‘It’s in the shed,’ she told him, rising. ‘I’ll show you. There’s years of rubbish down
there. It’s behind all that.’ She led the way from the stuffy room, down a back staircase and into a corrugated iron shed in the minature yard behind. ‘The rest of the building belongs to Mr Blake of the outfitters,’ she explained, pulling back a rusted bolt. ‘But the shed was in with the flat. It was in the lease.’

  It was damp and cold in the yard. Davies tugged his overcoat around him and his hand felt his fiercely beating heart. Growing triumph and fear banged like two clappers in his chest. A stale smell came from the shed. ‘I’ve put a lot of my old things—props and that sort of thing—in here,’ she said. ‘You know how fashions change even in this game.’ She was pushing aside some painted screens. ‘And here’s my clairvoyant stuff, my trumpet and my smoke machine. I packed that in. Gave me the creeps.’ She was clearing a way ahead. Davies took the pieces from her as she handed them back.

  ‘Here it is. I can see it. At the back. Could you get across there, Dangerous?’

  ‘Try and stop me,’ he thought. He moved her gently aside and clambered through the lumber. Then he stopped, surrounded by dust and relics, and looked. It was there. Celia’s bicycle. He almost choked with excitement. His arms, as they went across to grasp the handlebars, were vibrating. His face was streaming sweat. Then he got it. He touched the cold, dusty metal. He had got it!

  Firmly he lifted and pulled the bicycle away from its surroundings. It was pathetically light. He knew it was the right one. He knew that machine as well as its sad owner had known it. He touched the saddle upon which she had ridden those last minutes of her seventeen years. Carefully, despite his urgency, he lifted it clear of the surrounding junk, and eventually rested it on the clear floor. Madame Tarantella looked at it unemotionally. ‘Both tyres have gone down,’ she said flatly.

  Davies did not seem to know what to do next. He began to wipe the dust away from the frame with his fingertips. Then he leaned the tubed metal against his thigh and opened the buckles of the saddle bags.