Last Detective (5 page)

With his unknown thrill growing, he took the box down and put it on the central table. It creaked open. He pulled out the contents, hundreds of sheets, statements, browning newspaper cuttings and photographs. In a separate envelope was an enlarged picture of a pixie-faced girl licking an ice-cream. A dab of vanilla had got on to her chin and she knew it was there and was laughing about it. On the back was a caption. It said: ‘Celia Mary Norris. 5 ft 1 inch. 7 stone 10 lbs. Aged 17.'

For the next two hours he sat hunched in the enclosed room and read through the file. Down the corridor he could occasionally hear the evening life of the police station going on, the drunks, the threats, the weeping, and twice the echoing clang of the doors to the cells. By the time he had reached the last inconclusive page—the whole thing, left, abandoned, run out, exhausted but unfinished—it was ten o'clock by the station clock which he could see at the distant end of the corridor. He folded the documents and replaced them in their tin box. He went out, returning the key to the desk sergeant who had just taken over from Ben.

Outside it was raining. He pulled the huge overcoat closer about him and trotted clumsily to The Babe in Arms. The rough woman was lying on the bar floor having just cracked an ankle during her flamenco. Mod was trying to lift her but when he saw Davies he let her drop to the floor again. ‘For Jesus' sake, where have you been?' he demanded. ‘I've been stuck here buying my own beer.'

Davies asked for two pints but Mod still regarded him accusingly. ‘Fine bloody evening, I've had,' he complained. He nodded towards the rough woman who was now being lifted, howling, towards the door by three strong men. ‘Spent all night trying to explain about Spain to that lunatic female. She'd never heard of Franco or Don Juan Carlos. All she knows is that “Viva España” thing. She thinks Granada is a fucking television station.' He pulled up and began to look steadily at Davies who was smiling. ‘Something's been and happened,' Mod said carefully. ‘You've been up to something, Dangerous. What is it?'

Davies let his smile travel over the surface of his beer. ‘A murder,' he said quietly. ‘I've got myself a murder.'

Mod looked with amazement. ‘Your own murder!' he breathed. ‘They've given
you
a murder?'

‘No,' corrected Davies firmly. ‘They didn't
give
it to me. I…I sort of appropriated it.'

‘You…what?'

Davies grinned: ‘I'm not going to tell them about it.'

B
reakfast at ‘Bali Hi', Furtman Gardens, was a fragmented affair. Thin Minnie Banks, the schoolteacher, attempted to correct some abysmal exercise books for the day's lessons, while drinking her weak tea. Mod, undoing
The Guardian
, sat down to his toast, glanced over her shoulder and remarked: ‘Training the future unemployed, I see.'

‘You can talk!' Her voice was as piping as her frame. ‘Since when, Mr Lewis, have you done a day's work?'

Mod sniffed like a managing director and spread his paper. ‘It takes a great deal of skill and technique to remain unemployed,' he observed. ‘I doubt if your pupils would ever reach the required standard.'

Davies came downstairs and Mrs Fulljames heard him from her kitchen where she ate her breakfast not so much in privacy as secrecy. ‘Any sign of my bed yet, Sherlock Holmes?' she called.

‘Inquiries are proceeding,' Davies shouted back woodenly. ‘You will be informed of any progress.'

‘I'll be bloody lucky,' she retorted. ‘Who tried to blow up the cemetery then?'

‘Nobody,' sighed Davies. He poured himself some tea and splashed jam on a round of stony toast. Mrs Fulljames, cup in one hand, the
Daily Mirror
in the other, appeared at the door of her citadel. ‘
Anybody
could have told you that,' she jeered. ‘How could anyone blow up a cemetery? How?'

Davies lowered his toast. ‘It was the misreading of a handwritten message,' he said wearily. ‘We had received a warning but it was incorrectly written down, scribbled, in fact. I thought it said something was going to happen in the graveyard with a bomb. But ‘bomb' was badly written and I didn't correctly read it. It should have been ‘tomb'. But nothing happened to any tombs either, I just got double pneumonia.'

‘Police!' jeered Mrs Fulljames, returning to the kitchen. ‘You'd make better girl guides. God knows what would happen if there was ever a murder around here.'

Davies caught Mod's eye and set his teeth to fight the toast. He hoped the grinding and the grunts would reach Mrs Fulljames. If they did she took no heed.

Later he fed Kitty, who was prostrate, as usual, in the back seat of the Lagonda, but he left the car and the wheezing dog in the tin garage at the foot of the street and walked, his thoughts full, to the police station.

It was a wan morning with most people by now behind the gates at their work, stragglers at the bus stops, steam curtaining the window of The Copper Kettle café, and shopkeepers yawning behind their counters. He heard compressed coughing from the waiting room of the doctor's surgery, a milkman on a float clanked with his hazardous load, and two boys, playing truant, squirmed their way through the fence by the railway embankment. For a large place it was often as empty as a village.

At the police station some midnight miscreants were being taken from the overnight cells to the court. There were some familiar faces among the drunks, the drunks and indecents, the drunk and disorderlies and the drunks and incapables, and they saw Davies as a friend.

‘'Morning, all,' he said as he went through to the CID room. They rumbled their own greetings, and stumbled frowstily forward. After they had gone out, shivering in the early air, to walk to the courthouse around the corner, the desk sergeant took out an aerosol spray and played it around extravagantly. ‘Yardbird wants to see you at ten, Dangerous,' he called down the corridor. ‘He was shitty because he couldn't get hold of you yesterday. Wanted to know what you were up to.'

‘Inquiries,' Davies called back down the corridor. He had half an hour so he went to the canteen and bought a cup of solid coffee and two cakes. Then he returned to the CID room and took the file of Cecil Victor Ramscar from his locker. He had intended to go through it again but he turned instead to the one statement concerning the disappearance of Celia Norris. He read it, with an odd guilt, as though he were looking through something forbidden. Then, just as guiltily, he purloined the key of the ‘Local Records' room and took down the Celia Norris file. He felt a sharp unreasonable thrill as he opened it again. There she was, laughing up from her photograph, the ice-cream dab on her chin. He ran his fingers thickly down the edges of the documents and statements. All this, and nobody ever found.

Clipped to the front of the wad was a summary of the case and an index of statements. Davies took an absent-minded bite of one cake, and began to read again. He did not like the cake. It stuck to the roof of his mouth. He put the rest in a random file he took from the shelf. One day someone would find a cake in a file. He read through the summary.

Celia Norris had spent what was, almost without doubt, the final afternoon of her life planning her future. At 4 o'clock on 23 July 1951, she had gone to the youth employment office in the town to inquire about the possibilities of becoming a nurse. She had gone afterwards to her home at Hunter Street, almost under the rims of the Ali Baba jars of the power station, had a meal and then left for the youth club at St Fridewide's Catholic Church. At ten o'clock, or shortly after, she had left there on her bicycle. Her boyfriend, William Lind, had remained behind for a sports meeting and anyway his bicycle had a puncture and he had to walk home. So he did not accompany her. To reach her home she would have cycled along the main road to its junction with Hunter Street and turned there, or perhaps taken the short cut, which she had been known to do, being a girl of no nervous disposition, along the towpath of the canal, later joining the main road and completing her journey as before.

After that night nobody reported seeing her. The bicycle was never discovered. Her clothes were found, except her pants. A lipstick she was known to have carried in the pocket of her dress was missing. A youth called Andrew Parsons, a known underwear thief, was arrested on a call from the attendant of a twenty-four-hour public convenience in the High Street who had seen him handling some girl's clothing in the establishment. The clothes, a green gingham dress, white bra, white socks and brown Louis-heeled shoes, were identified as those worn by Celia Norris on the night she disappeared and presumably died. Parsons, a nocturnal moocher, told the police he had originally taken the garments from the public lavatory where he found them stuffed behind a cistern at one o'clock one morning in July. The shoes were inside the cistern. He believed it was July 24th. When three weeks later he saw in the newspapers that the clothes were the same as were described as belonging to the missing girl, he panicked and decided to return them to the place where he had found them. The police had questioned him for two days and then let him go. He was kept under surveillance but nothing more came from this.

The finding of the girl's garments, and the fact of the missing knickers which Parsons (who was found to have a collection of 234 pairs of assorted women's pants in a cupboard at his lodgings) swore he had never taken or even seen, had turned a desultory search for a wayward teenager who had previously strayed, into a hunt for a body and a murderer. Neither were ever found. Nor was Celia's bicycle.

And it had happened, by all the evidence, at ten o'clock on a summer evening—a warm summer evening too—and yet no one had come forward to say they had seen a girl in a gingham dress on a bicycle. In that anonymously crowded but somehow vacant place, when it was just growing dark, as it would have been, it was not so strange as it might at first seem. People did not stroll in those streets for there was nowhere to go and it was too early for the exodus from the pubs or the cinemas. Television was still a compelling novelty. There was a regular police van patrol taking in the High Street and the canal towpath (policemen on foot beat had recently been replaced) but neither Police Constable Frederick Fennell nor his colleague, PC James Dudley, who were driving their small vehicle in the area until midnight, saw the girl or reported anything unusual. Celia Norris had mounted her bicycle at the Catholic youth club and ridden away into nothing.

Davies remembered Yardbird and opened the door to look at the clock down the corridor. He still had seven minutes. His coffee was looking even more muddy and was now cold. He attempted a drink and screwed up his face. He took a football pools envelope from his pocket (he had resolved to seek his fortune that season) and noted on its back the names of those who had made statements in the case of Celia Norris:

Elizabeth Norris, mother; Albert Norris, father; William Lind; boyfriend; Ena Brown, a friend; Roxanne Potts, another friend; all members of the youth club; David Boot, youth club leader; Andrew Parsons, underwear thief and the name that had begun it all for Davies: Cecil Victor Ramscar, described as a friend of the girl's family. There were other names, statements made by people who thought they might be able to assist, but mostly nebulous, and, lastly, the negative report of PC Fennell and PC Dudley, who had been on duty in the police van that night.

The dock along the corridor said three minutes to ten. He still had time. From the file he took the envelope containing the various photographs collected during the investigation. They were pathetic little snapshots, sepia now, moments in a life that had not long to run. Celia with her mother, Celia with her dog, Celia at the seaside with a chisel-faced youth wearing a paper hat, possibly William Lind, and, finally, one that must have lodged in the envelope when he had first opened it the previous night. It showed Celia and another girl at what appeared to be a fairground or fête. Both wore summer dresses and were laughing. Standing between them, ten inches taller than either in an open-necked shirt and badged blazer was a bronzed man, grinning. At first glance it seemed he had his arms about their young waists. But Davies hurried into the desk sergeant and borrowed the magnifying glass the station clerk used for reading small print.

‘Don't forget Yardbird, Dangerous,' the sergeant reminded him.

‘No. No. Just going up,' answered Davies, hurrying back down the corridor. He put the magnifying glass on the photograph. He saw that although the man's hold on the girls seemed conventionally friendly, his fingers, in fact, were curved higher and touched the undersides of their breasts. He pursed his lips. That, he decided, might be David Boot, youth club leader.

Inspector Yardbird was grouped at his window, hands clasped Napoleonically behind his back, legs astride, shoulders square, a growl on his face. He was gazing over the creased and crowded roofs as though he was considering conquering them. He had called aloofly to answer Davies's knock but he remained with his back to the room for two minutes until a subdued cough caused him to turn to see the Detective Constable.