Last Detective (4 page)

The everyday working smoke had sauntered away across the industrial horizon, leaving the sky with a mildly puzzled expression. Davies walked towards the police station. It was not often he was called in to see the Inspector. He did not hurry although they had apparently been attempting to contact him since late afternoon. He had been feeding the ducks by the canal. There were not many people in the streets at that evening time, they had mostly returned from their employments and had not yet gone out to their enjoyments. Even the main road was subdued, giving Davies the feeling that he might be walking in the country. The cemetery which he skirted seemed almost busy by comparison.

They had secured the formidable gates for the night causing him to wonder once again on the reason for this moribund security. Few would want to go in after dark and certainly nobody was getting out. He paused at the big gates and peered in at the dusty greenery strangling the incisive sentiments of stonemasons. He touched his forehead in salute, said a private ‘Goodnight, all' and continued his course to the police station.

He toyed with the fantasy that Inspector Yardbird was calling him in to investigate something spectacular, a murder perhaps. Davies had frequently thought how he would handle such a matter. Not that they
would
ask him—not unless the remainder of the Metropolitan Police Force had been wiped out by typhoid fever. Even then they would bring someone in from, say, Devon County rather than entrust it to him. Anyway there had been no homicide in the area that day or for some preceding weeks; not, in fact, since a belligerent Pakistani had struck a quiet Irishman dead in front of the Labour Exchange using a tell-tale Eastern dagger to accomplish the felony. Davies had not been required to take any great or glamorous part in that investigation. In fact the brief inquiry he was instructed to make at the Labour Exchange he conducted with such diffidence that he was mistaken in his intention and, after an hour's wait, was offered a job in a laundry. Not for the first time he had determined to put more authority in his approach. He had even been loudly reprimanded by the Labour Exchange manager in front of its doleful customers, for failing to call it the Social Security Department. He had tried to convince himself that he was meticulous in his inquiries but even he had to admit that, for all the time he took, he left a good many buttons undone.

At the next corner to the police station he saw the early prostitute standing against the laurel bush that she always hoped and imagined would frame and enhance her dubious appeal. She was faithfully there at that hour. Her name was Beryl Suggs but he always called her Venus because, he said, she was like the evening star.

‘Hello love. Done it yet?' he inquired solicitously.

‘Nothing moving yet, Dangerous.' She returned the smile, drawing back vermilion lips, the bed for a row of ragged teeth. She sniffed the dubious evening air as though it might give her a clue. ‘Somebody'll be along in a minute,' she forecast. She looked at him curiously. ‘You're out a bit late. I always see you in the afternoon. You're down there feeding the ducks.'

‘I'm allowed out until it gets dark,' confided Davies.

Venus laughed and he walked towards the despondent laurels at the police station steps. Somebody, he saw, had written ‘Clean up the Police!' with an aerosol spray right across the front of the notice board outside the main door. He ran his finger along the dust of the laurel leaves and thought that the cleaning might well start there. At the base of the steps he paused and felt for his notebook and pencil. He was not going to be caught waiting for them. On one occasion, in the grim presence of a superior officer, he had found it necessary to ask several passers-by for the loan of a pencil and any spare scrap of paper they happened to have on their person. When this proved fruitless he had turned desperately first to the frosty Inspector and, when no help was forthcoming there, to the accused man who had obligingly held out both pencil and paper.

Davies steadied himself at the police station door, in the manner of a wanted man going to give himself up, then entered with what he hoped was a show of confidence. The duty sergeant was at the counter reading out a list of road accidents for the local newspaper reporter who was writing them without excitement in his notebook. ‘Anthea Mary Draycott, double tee,' recited the sergeant. ‘Minor injuries… 'evening, Dangerous…St Mary's Hospital. Not detained.'

There were two elderly people sitting on the hard bench of the front office, crouched and anxious as people are in police stations even if they have nothing to fear, and a further set of trapped eyes looked over the top of the frosted glass in the charge rooms. There was some fresh blood on the wood-block floor of the corridor but Davies deduced, correctly for once, that PC Westerman's nose had been bleeding again.

Davies followed the trail of red into the CID room where the haemorrhaging constable was hung over the washbasin. His eyes swivelled. ‘Get the keys, will you, Dangerous,' he pleaded.

The cell keys were hanging on their accustomed hook and Davies, knowing what was required, took them and dropped them obligingly down Westerman's heavy back. The constable gave a small start at the touch of the cold metal, but it stopped the nosebleed.

‘Thanks, Dangerous,' he said. He looked up. He appeared to have been eating strawberry jam. ‘Funny how the keys always stop it.'

‘Just don't ask me to get them out,' said Davies. ‘Better wash your face off. It'll look as though we're torturing the staff as well.'

Westerman bent and washed his face in the basin. ‘I'm glad it was you and not old Yardbird. I couldn't have asked him. Not again. He's such a bloody misery.'

‘Is he upstairs?' asked Davies. ‘I've been sent for.'

‘That's right, I was forgetting. No, he's gone home. He wouldn't wait past six, you know that. But I think the sarge has got some message for you.' He looked up and regarded his pink lower face in the mirror. ‘Thanks for the keys, anyway, Dangerous. I'd better go in the bog and fish them out.'

Davies went to the police station counter. The local reporter had gone. The sergeant had put a solid folio on the desk before him. ‘This is for you, Dangerous,' he said. ‘Came up this afternoon from Criminal Records. Ramscar. Cecil Victor. Heard of him?'

‘Vaguely. What's he done?'

‘Two years, three years and five years,' answered the sergeant. ‘Anyway this lot is for you. Yardbird says you're to read through it, peruse it, he says, and go up to see him in the morning. He was a bit grumpy that he couldn't get hold of you this afternoon, but there, that bugger's always grumpy.'

‘What's it for? Any idea?' asked Davies.

‘Ramscar used to be a bad boy around here years ago. Nasty lad. Then he went off somewhere to the big times. It looks like he's back and they want you to find him.'

Davies brightened. ‘Well, well,' he said. ‘That's a change anyway. Looking for a real villain. Better than larceny of a pigeon loft.'

The sergeant laughed, picking up a mug of tea, and allowed the laugh to serve as a blowing action to cool it. ‘What did he get, the bloke that nicked the pigeon loft? What's his name?'

‘Beech, Joe Beech,' said Davies, ‘fifty-five, plumber. Got the three months he wanted. He's going to make another working model of Buckingham Palace.' He picked up the file from the desk and frowned at its bulk. Then he walked towards the CID room.

The sergeant called after him: ‘How in Christ's name can you have a working model of Buckingham Palace?'

‘Don't ask me,' returned Davies. ‘I'm just a simple copper.'

The staff of the Criminal Investigation Department who operated from the station often complained that their communal room was the worst in the entire building, not excluding the cells. It was cold, green-painted and windowless, a high and dusty fanlight excepted. Shut in there a man could lose track of the tread of time. The seasons were only marked by the death-drop of flies from the ceiling in winter and the buzz of their descendants in the spring.

Spread around were some necessary but basic tables and chairs, a couple of disgruntled desks, and some scratched personal lockers. There was a consumptive gas heater and next to it a gas ring with a kettle and a collection of tea mugs. There were three wall adornments: a dartboard, a United Dairies calendar showing a milkmaid and a stupefied cow, and a framed representation of ‘The Martyrdom of St Peter'. The saint hung uncomfortably upside down on his cross. His face was not always the most morose nor the most puzzled in that office. There was nobody there now except Davies.

The canteen was still open and he had provisioned himself with a mug of coffee and three flecked pastries. Sitting down he struck his head against the hanging ceiling light. He let it swing balefully and silently like some untolled bell. When it had stopped he opened the file on Cecil Victor Ramscar.

He began at the back. Everything that was known about Ramscar was there, every conviction, every suspicion, every inquiry. There were the criminal blotches of his fingerprints and the photographs taken in prison, getting progressively younger until the final one showed him as a hard-looking lad in the Borstal hockey team. The first entry (theft of clothing coupons) was in 1945 and the last (suspected armed robbery, not proven) in 1968. After that there was nothing but a note: ‘Believed to be resident in Oakland, California. FBI information (Ref: FBI 384A) January 1972.'

Twenty-five years back in the folder there appeared a single typewritten sheet of paper. Davies leaned forward in the poor light. Across the top was a penned note: ‘Statement by Cecil Victor Ramscar. Reference Missing (believed dead) Celia Norris.' It was dated August 15th, 1951.

Davies read it studiously. It was, as were most of Ramscar's statements in the file, a complete denial. It gave his movements for the evening of July 23rd, 1951 and for several subsequent days. Ramscar, so he said, had been at the races and spent the night of July 23rd at a hotel in Newmarket with two strippers. Davies raised his eyebrows. Ramscar admitted to knowing Celia Norris because her father was a business associate, but denied he had spoken to her or seen her for the week preceding July 23rd or even after that date.

The statement had been accepted by the police after checking. It was stamped and acknowledged at the bottom by a Detective Inspector whose signature Davies failed to decipher. He remained blinking at it. He had never heard of the case of Celia Norris. He rose slowly in the drab room and walked out to the desk sergeant at the front counter.

The sergeant was a shiny sort of man with no hair. ‘Ben,' he asked. ‘You've been around here since the Flood. Ever hear of the case of Celia Norris? Vanished in July 1951?'

Ben had a habit of smoothing down a non-existent fringe. He did so now and said: ‘Oh yes, I know that one, Dangerous. Young girl, sixteen or seventeen, going home from a youth club, on a bike, I think. Just disappeared. Thin air case.'

‘Never found?'

‘No, not a trace. Not a sausage. I can't remember it all now but I think her clothes turned up somewhere.'

‘Did we treat it as murder?'

‘No. Not at first, only after; everybody thought she'd just gone off like young girls do go off. With some bloke or other. She'd done it before and her home was nothing to shout about. In fact, now I come to think of it, Dangerous, her old man was a bit of a villain around here, into all sorts of petty larceny and fiddling. That sort of stuff. I haven't heard of him for a few years. He's probably inside.'

‘And it never got off the deck?'

‘No, God, they couldn't even find a proper suspect, if I remember rightly. Pulled all the usuals in, but nothing. There was a lot of fuss, in the papers and all that rubbish. The CID here couldn't have solved a bloody crossword puzzle in those days and after they'd hooked in one or two obvious prize choices and let them go, the thing just fizzled out. It's still on the file. I'm surprised you've never heard anyone talk about it. Why did you want to know, anyway?'

Davies had no time to reply. The swing door whirled and in fell a weeping woman holding her head with one hand and a large saucepan with the other,

‘That fucker's done it again!' she howled at Ben. ‘Bashed me on the head with this! Right on the bleeding head!' Davies backed away. The woman took her hand away to reveal a spectacular bump. The sergeant opened the ledger on his desk with a long sigh which seemed to be repeated by the pages of the book itself. ‘Mrs Goodly,' he recited aloud. He wrote it down. ‘Vera. Which number Hawthorn Street?'

‘Twenty-seven,' she said, obviously thoroughly familiar with the ritual. ‘The fucker. I'll swing for him yet.'

Davies padded heavily away. He helped himself to a key from the board behind the counter and went down the corridor to a dark door marked ‘Local Records'.

Even then, at that initial moment, he was aware of something germinating inside him. Something moving with caution, but nevertheless moving. He switched on the light and went along the tin-boxed files. It had an entire file to itself: ‘Norris. Celia. 1951—'