Last Detective

by Thomas, Leslie

  Josie continued to stare at him in deep disbelief. ‘I…I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘Honest, I just can’t believe it.’

  ‘You didn’t think I could do it?’

  ‘No…no, it’s not that. I just didn’t think anybody could do it. And you’ve got the bike?’

  ‘Still in working order,’ Davies said quietly. ‘A bit creaky but nothing more. I’ve even got the remains of the flowers she was taking home to your mother. She got them from the cemetery, you know.’

  She appeared to be unable to digest the information. She slowly got to her feet. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to think about this.’ She looked at him doubtfully. ‘You’re sure,’ she said. ‘I mean you’re not having me on…’

  ‘I’m sure,’ nodded Davies. ‘Very sure. See you, Josie.’

  ‘See you,’ she almost stuttered. She moved forward quickly and kissed him on the piece of cheek that was showing. As she moved away she produced a small smile. ‘You’re brighter than I reckoned,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks,’ he replied. ‘Sometimes I surprise myself.’

  She went without looking back. He realized that his head was throbbing from the encounter. He slept briefly and then lay in the night dimness of the ward, thinking about Celia Norris and her bicycle journey to eternity twenty-five years before. He followed every turn of the pedals by those brown shoes. From the youth club to the cemetery. He saw her brazenly climb the wall, knickerless, and steal the flowers from a grave. He knew she would be capable of that. He could see Josie doing it. And then what? Waiting outside the wall, or just approaching it as she climbed over again in the gloom, was the mooching police van. At its wheel, a policeman who had been drinking at the social function shortly before; alone in the van while his colleague spent time with his fortune-telling lover.

  What did he do, that policeman? Did he get out of the car and stand waiting under the wall while she climbed over? Did he see then that this seventeen-year-old girl was wearing nothing below her gingham dress? Was he stern with her and did he take her into the police van, not seeing her bicycle left in the dandelions and weeds? Did they drive slowly up the High Street that humid summer night? And while they drove did that inebriated policeman suggest to that young girl that they went down by the canal bank together? Did he cajole or threaten her?

  Davies saw them walking in the dusk, the policeman without a hat, as Mr Whethers had seen. Down to the foot of the valley and by the bank. And then it happened. That policeman raped Celia Norris and murdered her. And disposed of her body. But not her clothes. Disposed of her body…but not her clothes…

  Suddenly Dangerous Davies shot up in bed so fast that his head sang with pain. He clasped it with a cry that was almost exultation. A man across the ward called out eerily: ‘Are you all right? Shall I get the nurse?’

  ‘No, no,’ warned Davies hoarsely. ‘Nothing, thank you.’

  The last thing he wanted was the nurse. He looked at his watch. It was only ten o’clock. They closed down early in hospitals. He slid clumsily out of bed, stood up and put his pillow beneath the sheet. His head banged in protest as though somebody were trying to get out through the bandages. There was an anteroom just outside the ward and last time that was where they had kept his clothes. He went painfully but hopefully across the polished floor of the ward, his head feeling like a turnip. But his hope was realized. His suit and his overcoat were keeping each other forlorn company on a single iron hanger. His shoes were in a locker beneath, but he could not find his socks, his underwear or his shirt. He took the clothes and the shoes and went into the toilet. He put them on over his pyjamas, and pulling the faithful overcoat up around his plastered ears he crept heavily towards the corridor. There was no one there. The night nurse was in a side room and the doorway to the outside was only a few yards down the passage. He gained it in three strides and let himself out into the chill air.

  He was a mile and a half from the single room of Andrew Parsons of the Salvation Army, which is where he wanted to be. Not even the most optimistic of taxis ever patrolled that threadbare area and he was thinking he might have to walk or to steal a bicycle when he saw a bus illuminating the distance. The bus stop was just outside the hospital. No one at the gatehouse took any heed of him and he timed his walk so that he gained the pavement just before the bus. Gratefully he boarded it, miraculously found some coins in his overcoat pocket, and sat on the cross-seat feeling relieved and elated. He thought he knew where Celia Norris was.

  At the next stop a couple, arms entwined, boarded the bus and sat opposite him. Their interest in each other was gradually transferred to him. At first they studied his heavily embalmed head, intently as though following every whorl and curve. Then the girl’s gaze dropped to his ankles. Awkwardly he followed her eyes down and saw that his pyjama legs were protruding below the turn-ups of his trousers and that immediately below that incongruity he was showing segments of bare feet.

  He smiled feebly across at them. ‘Night shift,’ he said as though confident that that would explain everything.

  They nodded dumbly but continued to stare until he left the bus in the High Street. When he last saw them, as the vehicle made off into the latening evening, they were with their faces pushed to the window, together with that of the conductor, to whom they had obviously reported the phenomenon. Davies waved to them as he crossed the road.

  He kept into the best shadows of the terrace houses until he came to the front door of Andrew Parsons’s lodgings. He knocked with misgiving which was justified by the beginnings of a scream which came from the flowered-overalled woman who answered. He tried to smile through the bandages which made matters worse, but fortunately he arrived at an explanation before she arrived at a screech. ‘Mr Parsons, please,’ he pleaded. ‘Salvation Army. It’s an emergency.’

  To his relief and her credit, she subsided. ‘It looks like an emergency too,’ she commented. ‘I’ll call him. He’s up there with his cronies. Blaring away. She advanced to the bottom of the stairs and bellowed ‘Mr Parsons!’ up into the gloom. She called twice more and eventually a phase of light showed that a door had been opened. ‘Mr Parsons, there’s somebody for you. Says it’s an emergency.’

  ‘Emergency?’ Davies heard Parsons return. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ she bawled back. ‘Looks like the Invisible Man.’ She turned to Davies. ‘Go on up,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand here shouting my head off.’

  Davies thanked her and advanced up the stairs. When he had gained the first landing, Parsons, on the third, called doubtfully again. ‘Who is it?’

  Davies chanted:

  ‘I am the ghost of General Booth,

  I’ve come to make you tell the truth.’

  He was pleased with his extemporaneous effort. He heard Parsons give a quick sob in the gloom and he knew he had been recognized. Parsons almost tumbled down the stairs to meet him. ‘Mr Davies…’ he said. Then, seeing Davies’s state, ‘Oh my goodness…what happened?’

  ‘I tripped over my collection,’ said Davies in the dark. ‘I want to have a chat, Andy. I’ve come specially to see you. Can I come up?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ pleaded Parsons. ‘Not now. Not in the room. We’ve got bandsmen practising.’

  As though to corroborate the statement a subdued trump issued through the open door above. Then a piping whistle noise. ‘All right,’ whispered Davies. ‘Tell me something, exactly and no bloody lies mate, and you can go back and get on with Crimond, otherwise we go up and talk about it there.’

  Parsons’s head had dropped. He was muttering, perhaps praying. ‘What? What is it then?’ he asked.

  ‘Right.’ Davies moved closer to him on the landing. ‘Where did you really find those clothes? Not in the public bog. Come on, tell me—they were not in there, were they?’

  ‘No,’ nodded Parsons. ‘Dear God, I knew it would all come out one day. I’m trying to live it down…The Army…’

  ‘Where?’ asked Dav
ies stonily.

  ‘No, not the convenience. I took them to the convenience when I tried to put them back, after I’d realized that they were that girl’s things. But I lied about finding them there. I was just all confused and upset, Mr Davies.’

  ‘Where?’ repeated Davies grimly. His heart jerked when Parsons said, ‘By the canal. They were just lying there. I nicked them. But when I heard about the girl, I panicked and took them to the convenience. That’s when they copped me. I couldn’t tell them the truth about where I got them. I was already on probation, and they knew I collected things from lines and that. They tried to get me for that girl, Mr Davies and I didn’t do it. I stuck to my story, every detail. And they couldn’t break me.’ A small triumph had entered his voice. Davies leaned out in the half-dark and caught him by the collar. Parsons stifled a squeak. ‘They could…you know…hang you in those days,’ he stammered.

  ‘That’s what they all say,’ said Davies, remembering Lind. ‘Now exactly where, Mr Parsons? To the inch.’

  Parsons’s face was shining with sweat in the dark. ‘Yes, yes,’ he nodded. ‘Exactly. Just at the bottom of the alley. Where the old wartime blockhouse used to be. Just there. I was walking down the alley, towards the canal and I saw them. I was tempted by Satan and I picked them up. God how many times I’ve regretted that weakness.’

  Davies could feel himself smiling painfully within the helmet of his dressings. ‘Lovely,’ he breathed. ‘Lovely. At the bottom of the alley, right. At the foot of those gardens, allotments.’

  ‘It was there,’ nodded Parsons. ‘By the allotments.’

  ‘Right,’ said Davies. ‘You can go back to your oompahpah, now. Have a good blow. But don’t piss off to any band festivals or anything. I want to know where I can find you.’

  ‘That’s all, then?’

  ‘Yes, that’s all. Why, was there anything else?’

  ‘No. Oh no. I’ll be going back.’

  Davies said: ‘All right. Play a tune for me.’

  Parsons ran gratefully up the grimy stairs. To satisfy his friends in his room he called over the banisters. ‘Good-night Mr Davies. And God bless. I’ll pray for you in your trouble.’

  It was eleven-thirty when Davies roused Mr Chrust and his two sisters-in-law from their beds above the newspaper office. The same lights and the same entranced faces materialized. They shuffled about and opened the door for him, a strong family politeness apparently preventing them asking how he came to be swathed in ghostly bandages. He did not keep them long from their rest. It was merely a matter of checking the recent issues of the Citizen for the report of the prosecution of the vegetable garden thief. Davies noted his name. George Tilth, 47, Harrow Gardens. He thanked Mr Chrust and said a muffled good-night to the ladies of the place. Then he went to see Mr Tilth.

  He was relieved to perceive that it was not yet bedtime in the Tilth household. There were lights downstairs in the modest terraced house and Mr Tilth answered his knock fully clothed and appropriately cradling a squat potted plant.

  ‘I don’t suppose you remember me?’ began Davies.

  ‘I can’t see you for a start,’ replied Mr Tilth reasonably. ‘Not through all that first-aid stuff. Who are you anyway?’

  ‘Police,’ said Davies. ‘Detective Constable Davies.’

  The man went white as lime. ‘I’ve done nothing, officer,’ he protested. He glanced down at the pot-plant as a woman might look at her nursing baby. ‘This is mine. I grew it all by myself.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ calmed Davies. ‘I haven’t come about anything like that. You’re the man who knows all about gardens and I want some information.’

  ‘Information? Horticultural information?’

  ‘Yes, you could say that. Can I come in for a moment?’

  Mr Tilth nodded. ‘Yes, all right,’ he agreed. ‘I’ve got nothing to conceal, Mr Davies. But perhaps you wouldn’t mind just waiting here for a moment.’

  Davies loitered while from the front room of the house came the sounds of furtive but urgent movements. He was tempted to step in but he knew he could not spoil it now for anything. Eventually Mr Tilth returned, a guilty flush replacing the former pallid countenance. ‘Yes, it’s all right now. To come in. Just wanted to get the place tidy for you. You don’t expect visitors at this time of night, do you? Not generally.’

  ‘Not generally,’ acknowledged Davies. He walked in. Even through his mask of dressings he could smell a greenhouse damp. He went into the front room where a table was covered with newspaper, flower pots, plants and scattered compost.

  ‘Taking cuttings,’ explained Mr Tilth. ‘Messy job.’

  Davies glanced around as he was guided towards a chair at the table. A large clothes-horse hung with towels had been awkwardly placed in the corner of the room, strategically, but not so strategically that it completely concealed the fronds of a palm tree coyly curling over its edge. Davies sat down. ‘Mr Tilth,’ he said firmly. ‘This visit is unconnected with any dealings you may have had with the police previously. I want to assure you of that.’ He hesitated then rephrased it. ‘No, that’s not strictly true. It is to do with that.’ He watched the consternation cram into the man’s face. ‘But not in the way you think. I want your help.’

  ‘Well, what is it, Mr Davies?’ asked Mr Tilth, still not convinced.

  ‘Your allotment. The one by the canal.’

  ‘As was,’ said Mr Tilth. ‘It’s not mine any more. Like I said in court, the Council took it away from me. After all those years of work.’

  ‘Yes, it’s the years I’m interested in. Your ownership went back to 1951, didn’t it? Before that even.’

  ‘Back to the nineteen forties,’ asserted the man, a glimmer of pride rising in his eyes. ‘In the dark days of nineteen-forty, when Britain stood alone. And it was my old father’s before that. Like I told them in court, it’s been our ’eritage, that allotment.’

  ‘You remember the wartime blockhouse that was built along the bottom, by the canal.’

  ‘Blimey, I’ll say. We had our nursery bed there and they came and built that bloody thing. I had a real row with the Home Guard captain or whatever he was. Told him, I did, that I was doing more for the war-effort than him and his tin bleeding soldiers. And he tried to tell me that it was there to defend my sprouts and my spuds from the Germans. Load of horseshit.’

  Davies let him finish. ‘When was it knocked down?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, a couple of years after the war,’ considered the man. ‘About forty-seven, forty-eight, I’d say.’

  Davies felt his hopes sigh as they deflated. ‘Not later. Not nineteen-fifty-one?’

  ‘No. Definitely not. My dad died in forty-nine and it was gone then. I remember I was annoyed when they knocked it down in the end because it was useful for keeping tools and that. But it was gone in forty-nine because I remember putting the garden shed what we built and the cold frames we had. I remember putting them on the base of the thing, the concrete foundation.’

  ‘Oh, what a pity,’ muttered Davies.

  The man regarded him, for the first time, with some measure of curiosity. He sniffed thoughtfully. ‘And that was in forty-nine,’ he repeated. ‘Definitely.’

  Davies rose wearily. His face was beginning to ache. The soreness below the bandages was making him shudder. ‘Right then,’ he said. ‘It was just an idea I had, that’s all.’

  ‘It must have been an important idea, Mr Davies, for you to come around here in that state.’ He glanced apprehensively towards the corner where the palm, like a disobedient child, was poking its head around the clothes-horse meant to be concealing it. ‘It wasn’t for nothing else, then, was it?’

  ‘No, no,’ Davies assured him. ‘Nothing else.’ He went to the front door. He wondered why the man had not asked him to go into the kitchen since the front room had proved such an embarrassment. Perhaps the kitchen would have been even more so.

  At the front door they lingered for a moment. The night air felt cold coming in th
rough the triangular eye, nose and mouth gap of the dressing. ‘That bit of the allotment was never any good for growing things,’ said the man reflectively. ‘It wasn’t just the concrete floor. We might have got that up, I suppose. But underneath there, there was another room, see…’

  The poor man thought Davies had attacked him. He jumped clear from the ground as he was caught by the detective’s hands. ‘A room? Underneath?’ demanded Davies hoarsely. ‘A room?’

  ‘Let me go!’ pleaded Mr Tilth. Davies dropped him. From his enclosed face his eyes shone. The garden man trembled. ‘Yes, that’s right, a room underneath. It was a sort of command post, I suppose, for the Home Guard. Like an air-raid shelter would be. There was a trap-door, a sort of metal cover, like a manhole.’

  ‘And when they knocked the blockhouse down, they left the other bit under the ground? So it’s still there? And there’s a trap-door?’

  ‘Still there,’ confirmed the man more steadily. His anxiety was now becoming overtaken by curiosity. ‘Why?’

  ‘Come on,’ said Davies taking his hand like a child. ‘We’re going down there.’

  ‘What, now?’ The man backed away. ‘At this hour of night?’

  ‘There’s no better time,’ insisted Davies. ‘Come on. Now.’

  ‘I’ll…I’ll get my coat and tell the missus,’ said Mr Tilth. He backed away still staring at the glowing Davies. A female voice called down the stairs. ‘I’m getting my coat,’ the man called up. ‘I’m going out.’

  ‘Are they taking you in?’ inquired the woman, as though it was thoroughly expected.

  ‘Shut up, for God’s sake,’ Mr Tilth called back. ‘I’m going to help the detective.’

  ‘That’s what they always say,’ returned the woman stoically. She came down two stairs from the top and Davies could see her thin shins trapped in large furry slippers. ‘Helping the police with their inquiries,’ she taunted. ‘That’s what they say.’