Last Detective (31 page)

‘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 through 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.'

‘Mr Tilth is not being arrested for anything,' Davies called up to her. ‘He has some valuable information for the police, that's all. We won't be long.'

As they went out into the street she creaked open an upstairs window and leaned out. ‘It's a bleeding trick, mate,' she called to her husband. ‘Don't you admit nothing.'

‘Go to bed, for Christ's sake,' ordered the gardener.

‘All right,' she returned angrily. ‘But don't expect me to wait for you to come out of prison this time. Don't say I didn't warn you.'

‘Silly mare,' commented Mr Tilth. They said nothing more.

It was about ten minutes' walk and they went silently through the hollow streets. Davies was conscious of a shiver in his stomach. He increased their pace. They crossed the main road and then went down along the bank of the canal. It was a dark night and they could not see the water, only sense it and hear its fidgeting. The lamp at the bridge stood in the distance like a mariners' lighthouse; under it there was a reflected yellow sheen on the dull water and its illumination touched the boundary hedge of the allotments.

‘I'm glad I'm with you,' said Mr Tilth. ‘The magistrate told me that the next time I came here I'd get three months minimum.' He looked at Davies and even in the dark Davies could discern the question all over his face. ‘It
is
all right, isn't it?'

‘Don't worry,' Davies said ambiguously. ‘We won't be here long.'

‘I wish I knew what we're going to do.'

‘Well, we've not come after turnips or sprouts,' said Davies. ‘Not this time.'

The man obligingly showed him the easiest place to climb over the hedge and then followed him into the garden. It was an inhospitable patch, draped with cold darkness, damp rising to the knee. In a strange manner the crammed town seemed to have vanished. They might have been standing in a bog. Davies's attention went straight to the end of the plot.

‘He's got his greenhouse on it,' sniffed Mr Tilth. ‘Rickety old thing.'

Davies walked slowly along the garden path. The greenhouse stood like a beached ship, a faint light coming through its ribs. The ground around was muddy, but Mr Tilth scratched the surface expertly with his shoe and Davies touched the concrete underneath.

‘Where was the entrance, the trap-door?' he whispered.

‘About here,' said Mr Tilth. ‘He's got the greenhouse over the top of it.' He took a pace forward and opened the wheezy door of the wooden-framed building. Davies saw the whole structure wobble at the touch.

‘Bloody awful old thing, this,' the other man complained. ‘Rotten. The wooden ones always fall to bits in the end.'

‘Is it inside, the trap-door?' asked Davies anxiously. He shone the torch to get his answer. It illuminated a small glade of pots and plants.

‘A mess, just like I thought,' grumbled Mr Tilth. ‘Look at that Fatsia, Mr Davies. Ever seen such a disgrace?' He pulled at a large leaf like a hand and it obediently came adrift from its stalk. He looked to the floor. ‘It's all wooden boards,' he said. ‘I thought he might have concreted it over again, but he wouldn't bother. Not him.'