Last Detective (13 page)

‘An old chap and a lady going shopping,' he replied.

She tutted as she re-entered the room. ‘They're so nosey, you see,' she said. ‘Did they know that you were coming here? Actually here?'

‘Well, yes. The old chap. He directed me. Funny old boy. Said the wind comes straight from the Urals.'

‘Mr Bently,' she said confidently. ‘Silly old sod. Excuse me, but he is. Goes around talking like a professor but he hasn't a clue really. Straight from the Urals. What's the Urals, anyway?'

‘Mountains in Russia, I understand,' said Davies.

‘In that case he could be right,' she acknowledged. ‘I heard his wife going on about it but she's as ignorant as shit, if you'll excuse me again. She was saying the wind came from the urinals. Anyway he saw you.'

‘I'm afraid he did.'

‘It'll be all over the flats by tonight,' she said confidently. ‘No privacy. Why don't we sit down. Move over, Limey.' She gave the cat a firm push.

‘Good name, Limey,' offered Davies. He hesitated. ‘I've never seen a green cat before.'

‘It's pricey to get him dyed,' she sighed. ‘But he's something to talk about when people come to dinner.'

‘I imagine,' said Davies. He finished his drink. He was aware of her nearness on the settee. He sat with his hands on his knees, as though he were in a railway carriage. ‘Perhaps I'd better tell you why I am here,' he said.

‘Ah yes,' she replied as though it were only of minor importance. She smiled fully as he half turned to her. Her teeth were smooth and menacing, white versions of her finger nails. ‘I'm not afraid,' she added. ‘I know I haven't been wicked. Well, not in a way the police would be interested.' She leaned forward abruptly and the heavy breasts, scarcely contained in the catsuit, bulged as though they wanted to view him also. ‘It's nothing my husband has done, is it?'

‘No. He's not in trouble.'

‘I thought not,' she said with disappointment. ‘I don't think he's capable of getting into trouble. What's it about then?'

‘Remember Celia Norris?'

There was no quick reaction from her. He watched for it and all that occurred was a slight roll of the breasts. Her face was half away from him, however, staring at the cat which had begun to wash itself hysterically on the green carpet, perhaps in some forlorn foray to rid itself of its hue.

‘The police are not still raking around with that?' she commented eventually in the same assumed modulated tone. ‘That's all a bit old hat now, isn't it, Celia Norris?'

Davies clasped his hands firmly before him like an insurance salesman trying to make a selling point. ‘Oh no, not really,' he said. ‘Look at it this way—there's somebody walking around free today who did away with that girl. I'm trying to find out who that person is.'

‘But it's years!' It sounded like exasperation. It was in her face, the lines suddenly cracking through the accurately applied make-up. Her arms she folded tightly in front of her in the manner of a washer-woman, pushing her breasts up towards her chin. ‘Years,' she repeated, getting up and walking away from him across the room. ‘What good can it do now?'

Davies elevated his eyes to see her standing above, confronting him. His steady expression stopped her. She sat down, not lightly, not with studied elegance, as she had done before, but with a heavy middle-aged clump.

‘It keeps coming up,' she sighed. ‘And I suppose it always will keep bleeding well coming up.'

‘Until it's solved,' observed Davies.

‘All right, have it your way. Until it's solved.'

‘It came up a couple of years ago, didn't it?' he pointed out quietly. ‘In the newspaper.'

‘That. Yes, that's right. She hesitated. ‘Well they offered me two hundred quid and I jumped at it.
He
went mad of course, my husband. But then he would. He's such a wooden bastard, you know.'

‘No I didn't.'

‘Oh Christ,
him
. You've never met anybody like him. If he picked his nose it would be on his conscience for life.'

Davies was watching the cat. It had finished its desperate licking and was now running its green tongue around its chops.

‘Your husband, Bill, that is…'

‘William,' she corrected purposefully. ‘He likes to be called William. See what I mean?'

‘Yes, I see. Well, William Lind, your husband. When you were all in your teens, those few years ago, he was Celia Norris's boyfriend, wasn't he?'

She nodded. ‘For what it was worth.' She laughed sharply. ‘She don't know what a lucky escape she had.' Immediately she glanced guiltily at him. ‘I didn't mean it like that,' she said.

‘Was he always so…wooden?'

‘Yes, always. Even as a kid he was a prissy bugger.'

‘But you married him. Didn't you have a baby?'

She smiled a pale smile. ‘You've been checking up, haven't you. I lost the baby. I was always a loser.'

‘Sorry, I'm stupid,' he said, embarrassed.

‘That's all right,' she sighed. ‘Anyway, I married him like you say. I knew what he was like but I thought he had a bit up top, you know, as well. Brains. I thought he might get somewhere. Make a life a bit comfortable.'

‘And he hasn't?'

‘Ha!' The snort was almost masculine. ‘If you call a capstan operator “getting somewhere”.'

Glancing at his glass Davies was moderately surprised to see that he had finished his crème de menthe. She saw the action but made no offer to refill it. ‘I've got a friend coming in a minute,' she said hinting that it was in explanation. ‘A girl friend, of course. Clare. We get up the West End three or four times a week. Walk around the shops, go to the pictures and that. It's harmless enough.'

‘I would think it is,' agreed Davies blandly, wondering why she had said it. ‘I won't keep you long. Really I just wanted to ask you to recall, in just a few words, what happened on that evening. When Celia disappeared. Just as you remember it.'

She sighed. ‘Well I've done it all before. Another time won't matter. She was at the youth club playing table tennis with Bill…'

‘William?'

‘I call him Bill behind his back,' she shrugged, ‘…and off she went home on her bike. It was about ten o'clock. Just getting dark. Nobody ever saw her again.'

‘Bill, William, stayed behind for a football meeting didn't he?'

Scorn quickly accumulated on her painted face. ‘Football! He didn't play football or go to football meetings. Afraid of getting kicked. No; he stayed for something. Probably a netball meeting, that's more like it. He liked to see the girls playing netball.'

‘Why was that?'

‘Probably liked to see their drawers.'

‘Oh, I understand.'

She glanced at him suspiciously. ‘Here, don't think
he
did it. I've got no bloody time for him, but he wouldn't do that. Not that sexual sort.'

‘The sexual sort?'

‘Well you don't have to be a detective, to work out that she wasn't done for her money, Celia. But
not
Bill Lind. He was there, in the club, for a good half hour afterwards. Anyway, not him.' She turned to him determinedly. ‘You're talking about a man who even now won't have a bath unless he's wearing his swimming trunks!'

‘Swimming trunks?'

‘His bloody swimming trunks. And I've told that to nobody else. Not even Clare, who's my mate. I'd be too ashamed. He wanted to lock the door at first, but I wouldn't have that. Not in my own home, with just the two of us here, so he put on his swimming trunks. Every time he has a bath he's in there like bleeding Captain Webb.'

Davies wanted to laugh but her face was crammed with unhappiness. ‘He comes from that sort of family,' she sighed. ‘I've heard his mother talk about a
chest
of chicken.' She rested her face in her hands and Davies sat embarrassed, wanting to touch her sympathetically.

Instead he said, ‘What about this man Boot? Dave Boot?'

Her head came up slowly as if it were on a lever. She was, about to answer when a melody played at the door. ‘Clare,' she forecast. She stood up and composed her face into the smile it had carried when he had first walked in. ‘I'll give you a call,' she said. ‘At the police station?'

‘I'll give you the number,' he said, writing it out for her. ‘We'd better fix a time. I don't like being in there longer than I can help. It's miserable.'

She smiled like some genteel hostess. ‘All right. Eight tonight. I'll use the phone box on my way home.'

‘Eight?' he said. ‘You won't be home to get your husband's dinner then?'

‘No I won't,' she said. She moved towards the door as the melody again warbled blandly. Davies thought how much the bell suited her.

She paused inside the door before opening it. ‘I don't do a lot for him,' she said across her shoulder. ‘But then he doesn't do much for me.'

Because the call was promised for eight o'clock he had to miss dinner at Mrs Fulljames's; he sat moodily in the CID room eating a hapless sandwich. He was wondering whether to eat the crust when the phone rang.

Ena was mildly brazen in a giggling sort of way. He thought he could smell the ruby port and lemon drifting over the wires.

‘Listen,' she said confidingly. ‘I reckoned it would be better on the telephone, but I've thought about it again. What the hell, I don't care. I'll tell you face to face. Can you meet me somewhere?'

‘Now?'

‘Yes, before I change my mind.'

‘All right. Where are you?'

‘I'm in a phone box at Willesden Green Station, Clare's gone off home.'

‘I could be there in ten minutes,' he said.

‘Come to the pub across the road from the station, The Lame Elephant. I don't mind waiting in there. I'm not proud. I'll be in the saloon bar but I won't get a drink. I'll wait for you, then you can buy it.'

‘Right. I'll be right along.'

He needed two hands to pick his overcoat up from the adjoining chair. It had been raining and the coat was porous, doubling its already considerable weight and bulk. It was like pulling a wet walrus on to his back. He went out, raising a heavy hand to the sergeant on the desk. His Lagonda stood, as ever, open to the rain but Kitty had crawled below the green tarpaulin. The dog lay in the back seat like an ominously covered cadaver. Davies got in and started the engine and Kitty growled with it. The great headlamps of the car careered grandly through the drizzle and the dreary streets as Davies drove towards The Lame Elephant. He wondered why, if Ena Lind despised her husband so much, she talked about them having people around to dinner.

She was waiting, in the saloon bar, enfolded in a coat of dyed rabbit, the space on the knee-high table before her cleared suggestively.

‘Double port and single lemon,' she said. ‘You're all wet. You look like a sponge.'

‘My car leaks,' he explained, going to the bar. He got her double port and single lemon and a scotch for himself and carried it back to the table. ‘No crème de menthe?' he said.

‘They wouldn't know what that was in here,' she sniffed, ‘If the masses don't drink it, they get confused. They're all bloody Irish anyway.'

Davies rolled off his coat again, considered the reliability of a coat-hook on the wall and decided not to burden it. He hung it on the chair next to him. Ena Lind regarded him doubtfully.

‘You're a bit of a mess, one way and another,' she sniffed. ‘Haven't you got anybody to look after you?'

‘Well,' he said drinking his scotch, ‘I do have a
sort
of wife. We live in the same house—it's a kind of boarding house—but we don't live
together
, if you understand what I mean.'

‘I understand all right,' she said. ‘Very well indeed.' She studied the inside of the saloon bar. It was the period of the evening when it had begun to swell with people and with smoke.

‘If people had homes,' she murmured, ‘the pubs would be out of business for a start.'

‘True, true,' he agreed. ‘But if there was a vote on it, homes or pubs, I bet the pubs would win. Will you have another?'

‘You've soon swallowed that.'

‘Yes, I tend to get through the first one quickly.'

‘I can see.' She disposed of her drink. ‘Right-o then. But this one's on me. No arguments.' She pressed a pound into his hand and closed his fingers around it. Her hand felt dry on his damp skin.

‘All right,' he nodded. ‘Thanks very much.'

‘Have a double,' she suggested. ‘I expect you'd have got a double for yourself, wouldn't you? Might just stop you getting pneumonia.'

He grinned gratefully and ordered the drinks. He returned to the table and raised his glass.

‘Cheers, Ena,' he said.