Dangerous in Love - Dangerous Davies 02 (4 page)

'I know,' he mumbled. 'It wasn't all that good, was it? That cafe's the sort of place you wipe your feet when you come out.' He looked up. 'Here's your bus,' he said with regret and relief. 'Fair amount of room.'

He remained standing on the pavement, feet splayed. She boarded the platform of the bus. She was the last one. The conductor called: "Old tight!' and rang the bell. Abruptly she leaned out and kissed Davies on the cheek.

'It was lovely, Dangerous,' she said.

The bus jolted and groaned off. Speechless, he stood and slowly raised his hand after it. The dog looked up to see who he was waving at. The bus joined the traffic. Through the diminishing windows, he saw that she had gone on the top deck. He waved again and then, with a suddenly soaring heart, he started out with his dog towards home. 'God help me,' he said, so loudly that people turned. 'I'm in bloody love.'

3

'Nomenclature,' mused Mod. 'Names, terms, appellations. Fascinating, fascinating. Why are Clarks Nobby? How intriguing to know that Bert Pollard's agricultural ancestor cut poles and Nicky Fletcher's fashioned arrows.' He peered roundly over the verge of his beer. Davies said: 'I'm sure it's of great interest to you academics. It was poor old Lofty I was thinking about.'

It would be difficult to force Mod to desist now. 'You are probably not aware,' interpolated the rotund philosopher, 'that the word "tawdry" emanates from Audrey. Tawdry Audrey. Derived from St Audrey's Fair hel
d annually on the Isle of Ely, I
believe. The shoddy goods were called "tawdry".'

'That,' admitted Davies, 'is something which somehow seems to have slipped my attention.' He rose, the only method he knew of stemming Mod's flow. Mod's tankard swung out in his extended hand like a weight on the end of a crane jib. Davies went to the bar and returned with the replenishments. It was early evening at The Babe In Arms.

A concerned expression now moved across Mod's large face. 'As I have told you previously, Dangerous, I have a major disability. Everything I glean from my studies, no matter how intense, has gone in a couple of weeks. It seeps down inside me somewhere.' He ran an untidy finger down his front.

'Like sediment,' suggested Davies, putting down his glass. He habitually drank without a handle. Mod drank with one. He described it as a safety measure to prevent spillage. 'Sediment,' he nodded. 'If you like.' He rubbed his stomach. 'But it's all there inside me, somewhere. Piled up, fact upon fascinating fact.'

Davies surveyed the muffle
red figure. 'I can imagine that’
he said.

Mod let his hollowed eyes travel around the bar. 'One day it might all explode
’
he forecast theatrically. 'Right here in The Babe. Like a bursting atom, shattering the bar stock, making staff and customers duck for cover! An explosion of knowledge.'

They left and trudged through the damp dark of the autumn streets, the pavements padded with leaves. 'It's funny,' said Davies, pushing his toes through the vegetation. 'You hardly notice the trees in this place until they're under your feet.'

'Until they descend to our level,' nodded Mod massively. 'And then, of course, it's too late. So many things are, Dangerous.'

They walked along the large and shabby Victorian house-fronts. 'Bali Hi', Furtman Gardens, in the better part of the borough and with a monkey tree at the front, was a ten- sober minutes' journey.

'If you
were going to commit suicide .
..' began Davies, 'what would you take with you?'

Mod sniffed the clammy air. 'It's always been my understanding that you can't take
anything
with you. No matter which way you go. We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.'

Davies said: 'Why should Lofty suddenly do himself in? He didn't have much of a life but he'd had the same life for years and he was apparently content. But, even if he did drown himself, would he have taken his pram?'

Mod paused and with his foot made a runic pattern in the leaves. 'It's a nice thought. Operatic. Charging into the Grand Union pushing a pram in front of you. But I don't think Lofty was operatic. If he had been, he'd have altered his act once in a while.' He scraped the side of his shabby shoe across the figure he had fashioned in the leaves. They walked on. Lights yellowed the windows of the bulky houses, lending even to the most pessimistic of them a gloss of welcome.

'I wonder what was in that pram, anyway?' said Davies.

'Perhaps a baby,' suggested Mod. 'Perhaps Lofty was a secret male nanny. Over the years he may have cared for many concealed infants. As far as I remember, whatever was in there was hidden below an old blanket.'

'Now we'll never know,' said Davies.

'You seem to have got one of your occasional bees in your bonnet about this one,' said Mod. They opened the creaking gate of 'Bali Hi' and went up to the stained-glass front door. The front hall light illuminated a pattern of glass flowers in the door with the virginal face of a young girl peering innocently through them. Davies bent gently and gave the glass face a kiss. 'Good evening, darling,' he whispered. 'I'm home.'

Mod had produced a key and opened the door. 'You've had too much time to think lately,' he said. 'After your sick leave, when you're back investigating big-time crime, stolen bicycles, vandalized bus shelters, knocking-on-doors-and-running-away, you'll soon forget Lofty.'

Davies hung fib coat on the grim hall-stand. There was an unfamiliar garment, a good grey coat. Davies touched the lapel. 'We've got a new lodger,' he said.

'I'm not sure this is the time to bring it up,' mentioned Davies when they had sat down to the suet pudding, potatoes and two vegetables. 'But my bed was wet this morning.' Eyes lifted from plates. The suet was heavy and hot.

and Mrs Fulljames, who had just put some in her mouth, juggled with it painfully. She fanned her hand in front of it. 'I beg your pardon?' she said as haughtily as she could at that moment.

'My bed,' repeated Davies. 'Wet. The leak in the ceiling has reappeared.'

The landlady sniffed. Mod read the folded
Guardian
at the side of his plate, his fork, like a tuning fork, poised near his ear. 'You're supposed to
eat
suet pudding, not listen to it, Mr Lewis,' Mrs Fulljames remarked tartly. Mod swung the food to his mouth and continued reading the paper. 'So sorry
’
he mumbled. 'I was absorbed in the Higher Management Vacancies.' Doris, Davies's estranged wife, regarded her estranged husband with everyday displeasure. Mr Smeeton, the Complete Home Entertainer, was memorizing jokes from a book in preparation for a professional engagement. He privately placed a Groucho Marx combination - nose, eyebrows and spectacles -on his face and then took them off, continued eating and reciting under his breath. Minnie Banks, a distraught schoolteacher, stared through the steam at some approaching fate. Only the newcomer, a pale pipe-like young man, looked uncertainly around the table.

'Mr Tennant,' said Mrs Fulljames. 'Perhaps he can help. I can't keep the rent at the present level
and
have the roof repaired every time it leaks. Mr Tennant, as it happens, works in water.'

'I'm an aquatic engineer,' said the young man. Minnie Banks gave him a skinny smile.

'Have you got a diver's suit?' inquired Davies.

The new lodger looked unsurprised. 'Not of my own but I use one at the subaqua club,' he answered. 'At work I'm usually concerned with tanks and suchlike.

I'm working at the power station for a couple of weeks.'

Davies balanced a dripping sprout on his fork like a projectile. 'If you hear a lot of noise in the next street, it's the Irish beating somebody up. Usually me,' he said.

'I've never known anybody spend so much time in hospital,' tutted Doris. Her nose curled. 'A burden on the National Health.'

Davies studied the loaded sprout but dropped it back to the plate. 'Mrs Davies,' he said coldly, 'I don't end up in the casualty department out of a sense of fun. I get there through my attempts, sometimes misguided, I agree, to keep law and order. So that the streets are safe.'

'Well, they're not,' complained Doris. 'I had a man followed me today.'

'I shouldn't complain about that,' he muttered.

'I wish someone would follow me,' sighed Minnie Banks. She blushed. Mod's brooding eyes moved like twin planets to her stick-like face. He said nothing.

Mrs Fulljames got up to clear the plates. 'Lovely, Mrs Fulljames,' enthused Davies. 'That suet was a real treat.'

She eyed him maliciously but went in silence to the kitchen. Davies leaned towards the new lodger.

'I'd like to get something out of the canal,' he confided.

The lamps along the bank of the Grand Union Canal were among the oldest and most sombre in London, and they cast a Victorian gleam on the oily water. They were spaced out at fifty yards so that the three slowly walking men progressed from one aura of dubious light into another. 'Body found at ele
ven-forty,' said Davies. 'Night
time, that is. October 7th. Been in the water twenty-four hours or more. Corpses tend to go unnoticed down here.'

They paused in the grisly glow of one of the lamps. Mod tugged his muffler closer. 'The body,' said Davies, pointing, 'was found about here. By some kids.'

'At eleven-forty?' murmured Tennant.

'They're allowed to stay up late around here,' said Davies defensively. He disliked amateur detectives. 'But where he was found is not necessarily the same place as where he went in.'

'Fell in or jumped in,' put in Tennant.

'Or was pushed,' Davies said defiantly. 'The tow-path varies in width.' He pointed. 'It's narrow and close to the edge along here, but back there it's yards distant.' They retraced their steps. The ragged asphalt path backed away from the water almost against the dark wall of one of the neighbouring factories. Davies paced the distance to the edge of the canal. 'Six yards - eighteen feet,' he said. 'If Lofty had been pushing his pram along this piece then he could hardly have gone in by accident. Even if he'd been drunk, which is unlikely because he didn't drink, he would have had plenty of time to pull up.'

He led them back along the bank. 'Not so, further on,' he said. 'The path is narrow and runs right against the edge of the canal. He could easily have stumbled and pushed the pram over the edge.'

They climbed the wet stone steps to the street and walked silently to The Babe In Arms. Three pale youths from Cricklewood, wearing tartan shirts and waistcoats, were nas
ally singing a country-and-west
ern song: a lament about a wife who had gone off for a good time leaving her husband with four hungry children and a crop in the field. 'It's a fine time to leave me, Lucille,' they howled.

'Who could blame her?' said Mod pensively.

Jemma came in smiling her spectacularly split smile. Davies introduced Mod and Tennant. She winced at the singers and sat down. 'In surrealist painting, of course,' Mod said, looking at her absent tooth, 'it's so often what is
not
there that makes the work so riveting.'

Jemma bent forward confidingly. Her hand, like velvet, dropped across Davies's wrist. She whispered: 'I've found something out. Lofty had a secret.'

It was only ten-thirty when they arrived at the Northwest London Refuge for Men but the warden was disgruntled.

'These chaps need their sleep like everybody else,' Charlie Copley grumbled, leading them through the snoring dormitory. 'It's heads down at ten, you know.' He had switched on a bleak light and as they trooped through, spectral foreheads rose over bedclothes and there were protests, inquiries and onsets of coughing. Someone, asleep, shouted plaintively that he wanted to go home.

Mod's eyes
flickered with melancholy in the half-dark. Davies whispered: 'Better pick your bed-space now.'

'I'd go to hell first,' muttered Mod. 'Or work.'

Charlie led them to a small brick room. 'Lofty's,' whispered Jemma. 'He had a room of his own because he was a regular.'

The abrupt opening of the door disturbed the man in the single iron bed. Uncomprehendingly he stared at them. 'I left the stuff in here,' said Charlie. Brusquely he turned to the occupant: 'No need to wake up, Barker.' Barker dropped beneath the blanket like a soldier ducking into a trench. Charlie bent down and began to move a small grating in the wall at floor-level.

'Lofty's own personal safe deposit,' said Jemma.

The grating came away with a sound loud enough to cause half the head of the room's occupant to emerge again. 'It's the police, Barker,' said Charlie. The ashen forehead and the disturbed eyes slid away. The warden put his hand into the aperture and brought out a dusty shoe box. 'Barker found it when he was nosing around,' he said.

'I found it,' confirmed a padded voice beneath the blanket.

'You'll have to sign for it,' said Charlie. 'I can't take the responsibility.'

'We'll sign,' Jemma told him. 'Detective Constable Davies will.'

Charlie took the box and they went out of the room. A ghostly 'good-night' followed them.

They followed the warden through the shadows of the dormitory once more. Faces, white blotches, appeared, for the men were awake and as excited as children now. 'It's Dangerous,' whispered a croaky voice, 'and that darkie lady.'