Last Detective (2 page)

‘How about arms?'

‘He's got arms and fists at the end of them.' The laden voice was of the wild man's landlady, a sniffling Irishwoman with a malevolent wall-eye. ‘He's twice as big as you,' she continued reassuringly. ‘And black. They're stronger when they're black.'

Davies eyed her unenthusiastically. ‘Why won't he come out? What's he doing up there in the first place?'

‘Drunk,' she said solidly. ‘Drains a bottle of whisky and a bottle of rum every day. I've told him he'll end up like an alcoholic.'

‘Very likely,' agreed Davies. ‘Have you got a bucket, missus?'

‘I have,' she said. ‘Would you be wanting a mop as well? Is it for the blood?'

‘Just the bucket,' sighed Davies.

She dragged herself into the dark house and returned to the front with a bucket.

‘What's his name?' Davies asked the sergeant.

‘Bright,' answered the sergeant looking at his notebook. ‘Pomeroy Bright.'

‘Pomeroy?' said Davies wearily. ‘There's never a Bill or a Ben among them, is there? Okay. Give me the pail, missus.'

The Irishwoman handed it to him. First he leaned up the stairs and shouted, ‘Pomeroy, it's the police. Will you come down, please.'

This reasonable request was greeted by the most colourful cascade of Caribbean abuse. Davies felt his eyebrows go up. ‘I don't think he's coming down,' he confided to the sergeant.

‘Pomeroy,' he called again. ‘You can't win, son. Come on down and let's sort it out down here. Why don't you be reasonable?'

‘Because I ain't fuckin' reasonable, man,' came the response. ‘I'se waiting for you to come and get me. Come right up, man. Come right up.'

‘Shit,' said Davies quietly. He turned to the sergeant. ‘I'm going up,' he said. ‘Will you make sure your storm-troopers are just behind me and not a tenpenny bus-ride away?'

‘We'll be there to catch you,' said the sergeant unpromisingly. ‘What's the bucket for?'

‘What d'you think it's for? I'm not going milking. It's to take the brunt of whatever this nut's going to sling. It's what they call bitter experience. You're sure he's not got a gun?'

‘I'm not sure, but I don't think so,' said the sergeant comfortlessly.

Davies groaned, held the bucket in front of his face like a visor and said, ‘Right, come on then.'

He charged up the stairs like a buffalo, yelling into the echoing bucket, his overcoat flapping about his ankles. The Irishwoman fell back and crossed herself hurriedly, the police squad, taken aback by the abrupt frenzy, hesitated and then went gingerly up the stairs after Davies.

He threw himself against the door which to his astonishment gave easily. It had not been locked. Pomeroy Bright was waiting for him two paces into the room. He was a huge man and he held a full-length framed wall-mirror like a bat. He was entirely amazed at Davies's entry behind the bucket and stood immobile for a moment.

Davies stopped inside the door and, not being attacked, lowered the bucket. It was then that Pomeroy swung the long mirror. He batted it horizontally at Davies's head. Davies, his protecting armour lowered, had the unique vision of his own consternation reflected in the glass the moment before the mirror hit him. He fell to the dusty floor and was trampled under the boots of his fellow officers rushing in to overpower the West Indian.

When it was over and they had stopped his forehead bleeding he was helped out by two immensely cheerful ambulancemen to desultory applause from the grown and appreciative audience in the street.

Davies let them take him to the hospital in the ambulance. He was conscious of his right eye swelling.

‘Never mind,' sympathized the ambulanceman as they travelled. ‘The mirror didn't break so there's no need to worry about the bad luck.'

It had been a difficult summer for Davies. Not only had the London months been untypically hot and arid but, by the autumn (or The Fall as he, a natural pessimist, preferred to call it) his personal and professional life had deteriorated even further than he, one of the world's born stumblers, could have reasonably expected.

His comfortable and long-standing affair with a Tory widow in Cricklewood had been terminated upon his mistakenly climbing into her teenage daughter's bed, while drunk, and finding himself surprisingly welcome, but later discovered by the Tory widow herself.

Life in ‘Bali Hi', Furtman Gardens, London NW, a shadow-ridden boarding house overseen by a Mrs Fulljames, was far from serene. His wife Doris also lived there, but separate from him, occupying her own quarters and glaring at him over the communal table. Other lodgers included a Mr Harold Smeeton (The Complete Home Entertainer), who sometimes sat at dinner dressed as a clown or a maharajah; Mod Lewis, an unemployed Welsh philosopher; Minnie Banks, an outstandingly thin infants' school teacher; and a passing parade of occasional lodgers of all manner of creeds and greeds.

Professionally, it was no use denying it, his activities had been less than glamorous. The arson of the confessional box at St Fridewide's Catholic Church, the theft of a pigeon loft, and even less glorious cases descending almost to instances of knocking-on-doors-and-running-away, was scarcely big crime. It might be asked, indeed he frequently wondered himself, for he was an honest man, why he was retained in the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police, except for the necessity for having someone available in his division to lead the police charge on hazardous occasions. Davies had been thrown down more flights of stairs than any man in London.

He was also utilized for routine checking tasks involving endless plodding of the streets and the asking of repetitious and usually fruitless questions. Through these urban journeys he had become known to a great many people and he himself knew some of them. His nature was such that suspicion only dawned on him by degrees, his view of the stony world he walked was brightened by a decent innocence. He was kind even when drunk.

He was, however, drinking too much, even by his standards, and he had twice been the victim of ferocious attacks by his own dog, Kitty.

Davies, a long man, thirty-three years old, inhabited his tall brown overcoat for the entire London winter and well into the spring. By the first frosts he was resident again.

He was to be seen at the wheel of his 1937 Lagonda Tourer, forever open and exposed to the weather, the hood having been jammed like a fixed backward grin since 1940. It was a car which prompted envy in many enthusiasts, almost as much as it evoked their disgust that such a rare prize should be kept in so disgraceful a condition. It was rusty and ragged. Its fine great brass lamps wobbled like the heads of twin ventriloquists' dummies. Its metal was tarnished to brown, its elegant seats torn and defiled with rubbish. In the back lived the huge and unkempt dog, as foul and matted as the rest of the interior.

His area of operation, if it could be termed that—his ‘manor' in police parlance—spread out in a ragged hand from London to the north-west. Fortunately his efforts there were reinforced by many other policemen.

It was a choked place, a great suburb of grit and industrial debasement. Streets spilled into factories and factories leaned over railway yards. A power station, its cooling towers suggesting a touch of Ali Baba, squatted heavily amid the mess like a fat man unable to walk a step further. In winter the air was wet and in summer the sun's brightest and best was rarely more than bronze. Spring might bring an inexperienced cuckoo in from the country but he soon fled for there was nowhere for him. Trees and flowers were born to fight and lose.

There were factories for the making or assembling of soup, dynamos, home electric organs, rat poison, bicycles and boot polish, conglomerated in all their various grimes. Smoke hung about and the dust had no time to settle on Sunday before it was stirred again on early Monday. In the old days the district had been quite famous for its watercress.

Lying amid it all, like an old man's outstretched arm, was the Grand Union Canal, grand in no way now. Its greened unmoving water divided the whole region, its modest but still ornate bridges pinned the banks together. Almost parallel with the canal there were several main, mean, shopping streets, jointing in the way a drainpipe joints at a change of direction. The people of the place were Irish, Indians, Pakistanis, West Indians, Africans and some of the original British. Few of them liked it. It was somewhere to be, to work.

It was evening by the time Davies left the Casualty Department of the hospital with his stitches, his black eye and his aching head. He reported to the police station, where his injuries hardly raised a glance, and then walked to a public house called The Babe in Arms where it was his homegoing habit to drink as much as possible with his fellow lodger and friend Mod Lewis, a Welshman named Modest after Tchaikovsky's brother. Mod was happy to be known as a philosopher. His great talent was loyalty (he had been faithful to the same Labour Exchange for twelve years) and he knew many unusual and useless things, for he had read half the books in the public library.

Mod viewed his smoked eye with resigned sympathy. ‘Been leading the charge again, have we,' he sighed.

‘Once more into the breach,' agreed Davies heavily. He examined his eye and plastered forehead in the mirror across the bar. ‘The eye is nothing,' he said. ‘You ought to see my body. Covered in coppers' bootmarks. I'm a sort of human drawbridge. They have me knocked down and then they all run over me.'

Although it was not dole-day Mod bought him a beer and he drank it gratefully but not without some pain.

The public bar was as tight as a ravine, only narrowly escaping being a corridor. Along the windows on to the street was frosted glass, curled with Victorian designs. At that time of the evening, with the lights still on in the fronts of the shops across the road, the homeward figures of the workers passed like a shadowgraph. A rough woman came in and put a coin in the juke box. She played the same tune all the time, ‘Viva España', and when she had taken a few drinks she would sing and dance to it as well. She winked at Davies as though they shared some private love, joy or secret. The sound of the record overcame the cries of Job who dolefully sold his evening papers at the corner crying: ‘Tragedy tonight! Tragedy tonight!' It was a statement never challenged and indeed frequently true.

‘You know,' said Mod the philosopher, pulling his pint glass from his face with a slow strength that suggested it might have been glued there. ‘Injured as you are, you're a lovely drinker, Dangerous. Lovely.'

Davies thanked him seriously.

‘No, but you are,' pursued Mod. ‘I've been watching you lifting that pint. It's like a bird in flight.'

Davies was accustomed to the poet's fancies. He acknowledged it with an encore of the drinking movement which Mod duly stood back to admire further. The demonstration drained the glass and Davies ordered refills.

‘It's a pity to see you in such a poor way, especially since your jug-lip has finally healed,' remarked Mod, accepting the beer gratefully as though it were an unexpected pleasure. ‘It looked very nasty. Just like a spout. It was painful to sit at the table and observe you attempting to drink soup.'

‘It's the first time you've mentioned it,' said Davies, pulling down his lip and examining it in the mirror across the bar.

‘Well, I didn't like to before, boy,' said Mod. ‘And neither did our fellow lodgers. Indeed it's nothing very new to see you come injured to the dinner table. Tonight they will have a new array to intrigue them.'

‘Part of the job I suppose,' shrugged Davies. ‘I seem to have spent half my police life looking up from the floor into the face of somebody intent on murder.'

Mod sniffed over the rim of his beer. ‘If you ask me that's why they keep you. You're no detective, I can tell that.'

‘You've mentioned it before.'

‘No offence, Dangerous. But even you must realize that. When did they last give you a decent, wholesome crime of your own to solve? They either have you trekking around knocking on doors or leading the charge up the stairs to some madman's door. For example, where, may I ask, did you come by the jug lip?'

‘A disturbance of the peace,' said Davies. ‘A fracas. The sort of thing you're bound to get in this sort of place. Have you ever thought how many people around here are actually at war with each other? We've got two religious lots of Irish, hostile African tribes, Indians and Pakistanis, Jews and Arabs. That's how I got the lip, the Jews and the Arabs. Some fool at St Saviour's Hall got the bookings mixed up and let the place to the local branch of El-Fatah and the Jewish Lads' Brigade on the same night. And I got in the middle of it.'

He pulled down the lip again and peered over to the mirror. ‘It's gone back all right, though,' he said. He began to think of dinner. ‘What time is it?'