Last Detective

Leslie Thomas

F
ELONY
& M
AYHEM
P
RESS
• N
EW
Y
ORK

"Well, the beginning,
that is dead and buried."

—
Celia
As You Like It

T
his is the story of a man who became deeply concerned with the unsolved murder of a young girl, committed twenty-five years before.

He was a drunk, lost, laughed at and frequently baffled; poor attributes for a detective. But he was patient too, and dogged. He was called Dangerous Davies (because he was said to be harmless) and was known in the London police as ‘The Last Detective' since he was never dispatched on any assignment unless it was very risky or there was no one else to send.

D
aybreak (they did not have dawns in those parts) arrived over the cemetery to a show of widespread indifference. A laburnum dripped unerringly, cats went home, and the man lying on the tombstone of Basil Henry Weggs (‘He Loved All Other Men'), late of that parish, stretched with aching limbs and desolate heart. A wasted night. No one had attempted to blow up the graveyard.

It was not something he had reasonably expected to occur for it would not only have been pointless but so difficult as to verge on the impossible. Nevertheless the scratchy note delivered at the police station had to be treated with some demonstration of seriousness and, naturally, they had sent him. It had proved an uncomfortable but not particularly haunting night. Wrapped in his enormous brown overcoat and spreadeagled on the unyielding stone, Davies had wondered, in a loose sort of way, what the odds were on the morning heralding The Day of The Resurrection. He imagined the stones creaking open and everybody climbing out, rubbing their eyes. But nothing had happened and he was not surprised. It was not his fate to be present on great occasions.

With the day, and its banishment of even the remote chances of both saboteurs and spectres, he dozed briefly and awoke when the cemetery caretaker gave him a vicious push just after eight o'clock.

Davies opened gritty eyes. ‘Shouldn't sleep on the slabs,' said the man. ‘How can you expect anybody else to respect the fucking place if the law don't?'

Creakily Davies stood up. His overcoat was spongy with dew. The caretaker brushed the tombstone clean as though it were a settee. ‘Is that your load of junk outside the gate?' he inquired.

‘My car? Yes.'

‘What's that in the back seat?

‘It's a dog. He lives there.'

The man appeared to accept this with reluctance. But he did not pursue it. Instead he said: ‘You shouldn't park it here. Not in front of the gates.'

‘I didn't think anyone would be going out,' remarked Davies. ‘I'm surprised you bother to lock the gates.'

‘That's to stop people getting
in
,' argued the caretaker. ‘Vagabonds and the like.' He regarded Davies with suspicion. ‘Are you sure you're the law?' he said suspiciously. ‘In that coat?'

Davies looked down the long, wet, sagging length of his coat. His shoes poked beneath its hem as if peeping out from below a blanket. ‘Very good for tomb-watching, this coat,' he said gravely. ‘Very warm, down to the ankles. I got this at a police sale of unclaimed property.'

‘I'm not surprised it was unclaimed,' said the caretaker. He sniffed around in the cold air. ‘Anyway, are you going? I've a lot to do.'

‘I expect you have,' said Davies. ‘Tidying up and that.'

‘That's right. You're off then?'

‘Yes; I'm off. No bombs, nothing went bump in the night.'

The man could scarcely withhold his disgust. ‘I should think not,' he said. ‘You must be mad. Who'd want to blow up this place?'

‘Search me,' shrugged Davies. He began to shuffle down the path. ‘Good morning.'

He made towards the gate. The caretaker wiped his nose with his fingers and watched the long, retreating, brown overcoat. ‘And good riddance,' he said just loud enough for Davies to hear.

Davies was almost out of the gate when he paused by a massive, flat tombstone which had sunk spectacularly at one corner. ‘Hoi,' he shouted out at the caretaker. ‘Here's one that needs straightening!'

‘Up yours too,' said the man unkindly.

At 10 o'clock, notwithstanding his uncomfortable night-duty, Davies was due to give evidence in court. (The Queen versus Joseph Beech. Attempted felony, viz a pigeon loft.) Because he disliked testifying in court, he often wished the pubs opened at breakfast time. Too frequently he found his sympathies on the side of the accused.

First he took the Lagonda and its torpid dog to the tin garage where he kept them. Kitty growled ungratefully when roused from beneath its tarpaulin for breakfast. The dog was a heavy animal with a rattling chest, a cross between a St. Bernard and a yak. Its chest vibrated nastily and it cleared its throat. While it ate he tried to pull a few bits of debris from its matted and tangled coat, but the animal rolled a threat from its throat. Davies desisted. ‘Sod you,' he said in disappointment. ‘You'll just have to miss Crofts.'

A few hundred yards short of the court was a café painted the appropriate hue of HP Sauce. It was called The Copper Kettle, though the original kettle had been stolen long ago. It was that sort of neighbourhood. The establishment was owned by a villainous couple, Mr and Mrs Villiers, who nevertheless made a sensible cup of tea and attracted a clientele of constant interest to the police. Davies had once good-naturedly bought a tea and a round of bread and dripping for a man in there who appeared to be in some need. He was, in truth, impoverished, mainly because he had failed in an attempted armed robbery on a post office only the day before. Davies's kindly and typical indiscretion might have gone unnoticed but for the fact that the man, when arrested and charged in court, made public thanks to his benefactor from the criminal dock.

Davies drank his tea from a large stony cup and winced as the proprietor, behind the sodden counter, took an investigative bite of the five-pence piece he proffered in payment. He did that every time and, for Davies anyway, the joke had grown cold.

Nevertheless he was greeted with friendship at the court. As he went through the outer hall minor malefactors of all persuasions, drunks, shoplifters, threatening-words-and-behaviourists, wilful damagers and obscene exposures, bade him a familiar good day.

‘'Morning, Dangerous.'

‘God bless you, Dangerous.'

‘They nabbed me at last, Dangerous.'

He walked, smiling and nodding to each side like the popular manager of a happy factory. Jealously other officers frowned.

The magistrates' courtroom seemed to him, at times, like a small amateur theatre, with the public spectators, the police, the press reporters and the witnesses playing their clumsy parts, eager for every trivial, shocking exposure, always nodding knowingly as evidence accumulated, always laughing at some dry joke of a magistrate. At times even the accused would join in the laughter and then Davies was tempted to warn him it would not ingratiate him with the trio of looming justices on the bench above.

After the drunks had been processed the courtroom was redolent with the odour of morning-after. A lady magistrate held her handkerchief to her imperious nose. The warrant officer made a disgusted face but, pulling himself together, called, ‘Case of Joseph Beech, sir, Number 23.' Davies sighed, pulled off his overcoat as though he were reluctantly stripping to fight and shambled, in his large old blue suit, across the courtroom to the witness box. He stood, Bible poised, ready to make the oath, the suit hanging forward like a threatening avalanche. The magistrate eyed him with a disapproval not far elevated from his examination of the prisoner Joseph Beech who, having ascended the stairs from the cells, now rose as if by some magic in the dock. He shouted ‘Guilty!' before anyone had asked him.

Davies took the oath. Then recited: ‘Acting on information received, your honour, I went to 23, Whitley Crescent, and there found the accused apprehended by the householder, a Mr Wallace, who said to me: “I have just caught this bastard trying to nick my pigeon loft.”'

‘Tell them
who
you received the information from then, Dangerous,' prompted the man from the dock eagerly.

‘In good time, Mr Beech,' replied Davies, embarrassed.

‘Tell them. Go on,' said the insistent accused.

Davies glanced at the magistrate for help. ‘Tell us, for goodness sake, Mr Davies,' said the Chairman impatiently. Each time Davies gave evidence in his court it seemed to develop into some kind of farce.

‘I'm sorry, sir,' said Davies politely. ‘In fact I received the information from the accused himself. I would have included that in my evidence, of course, if he had given me time.'

‘From the accused? He
told
you he was going to steal this pigeon loft?'

‘Yes, sir. I told him some years ago, sir, that if he ever felt the urge to commit a felony then he could telephone me first, so that I could dissuade him, sir. I saw it as a method of keeping him out of prison.'

‘It did too,' confirmed Beech smugly. ‘I used to ring him up and he'd come and stop me. But this time he was too slow and the other bloke copped me first.'

‘I was in the bath,' Davies said apologetically.

‘All right, all right,' said the magistrate impatiently. ‘Let's not turn it into a performance.' He glanced at Davies and then turned to Joseph Beech. ‘You stand a good chance of going to prison for three months,' he said.

Joseph Beech sighed happily. ‘I'd like a bit of stir,' he nodded. ‘Last time in the Scrubs I made a model of Buckingham Palace out of bits of wood. A working model. It was ever so good, wasn't it, Dangerous?'

At the police station he went into the airless CID room to write his report on the night in the cemetery and to do his football pools. Hardly had he sat down when the telephone rang. He picked it up.

‘Dangerous,' said the duty sergeant. ‘There's a West Indian run amuck, or whatever it is they do, in Kilburn. He's in his lodgings and threatening to burn the dump down. The squad car's just leaving—they want you along too.'

‘Who else?' sighed Davies. He rebuttoned his overcoat and went out to join the two policemen in the squad car. They took only three minutes to the address in a street of downcast lodging houses. Four policemen from another station were already grouped at the door. There was a scattering of expectant watchers in the street. Davies trudged up the broken outside stairs. ‘What's this?' he said approaching the policemen. ‘A procession of coppers? What are you waiting for—the band?'

‘Assessing the situation, Dangerous,' sniffed the ser-geant.

‘Waiting for me to get my head caved in again, more like it,' said Davies. ‘Where is he?'

‘Top room. Right at the head of the stairs. He's a tough bugger by all accounts.'