Last Detective (24 page)

They went on a short journey as near to a nightmare as Davies had been in waking hours. Each door they reached was double-locked and unlocked, each corridor seemed to go deeper and deeper into the throes of the building. He heard screams and shouts, and faces, faces pallid with amazement appeared at side windows as they walked by. Eventually they reached a door set apart from the others.

‘He's in here, waiting,' said Longton quietly. ‘Something I forgot to ask, Mr Davies. Does he actually know you?'

‘No,' replied Davies. ‘We've never met. He had left the police before I arrived in the division.'

‘I see,' said the doctor. He knocked courteously and a voice inside bade them anxiously, ‘Come in.' Even from behind Davies knew that Longton was smiling as he entered. He could tell by the wrinkles at the nape of his neck. An ashen-faced, ancient, shaking man sat on a wooden chair by at plain table. ‘Mr Davies to see you, Mr Fennell,' announced Dr Longton.

Fennell stood irresolutely. His face trembled and, as though it could not hold them, finally cracked into gigantic tears. ‘Oh, thank you for coming,' he said to Davies, holding out his hands. ‘My old friend, thank you for coming.'

M
adame Tarantella Phelps-Smith, High Class Gipsy Fortune Teller, was a flitting figure in the town. Over the years less had been seen of her, not merely because she made her outdoor appearances infrequently, but because she seemed to be getting smaller as her life went on. Beryl Adams, as she was before she was touched magically by a Gipsy Soothsayer at a fair on Hackney Marshes, had once lent an exotic touch to the labouring surroundings of the district. She flowed about in robes that moved like a coloured sea. She had rings on her fingers and bells on the long curly toes of her embroidered shoes. Davies had always thought of her as a tall person; even her face seemed to be tall, a high forehead and a deep chin; her eyes were vertically elongated, her eyebrows aloft and arched and her mouth a perpetual upright oval as though she received an amazement every moment of her life.

She used to be seen in various parts of the town dispensing ready magic and telling the futures of the inhabitants who, in that hard and gritty place always hoped that things might improve. But the years had dimmed her eye and her ambitions and by the time she came to Davies's professional notice she contained her outside forays to dashes to the off-licence and the fish-and-chip shop. By this time her back had bent, her tall arms hung and swung almost to the pavement, and her shoulders were forever hunched.

‘It's the years I've spent leaning over this bloody crystal ball,' she complained to Davies. ‘It's a risk of the job I suppose. Like miners get that disease, whatever it's called, soothsayers get bent backs and hunched shoulders.'

‘You get a lot of business?'

‘No, but I have to practise, otherwise you get rusty.'

‘Policemen get flat feet,' he sympathized. ‘And a pain in the neck. I went to see Fred Fennell yesterday.'

Madame Tarantella seemed unsurprised. ‘Fred Fennell,' she mused as though only days had passed since she last read his palm while they lay unclothed in her patchwork bed. ‘Dear Fred. How is he? Getting old now, I suppose.'

‘He's keeping pace with the rest of us,' agreed Davies. Her room was above a men's plain outfitters, Mr Blake's, who had clothed half the working force of the district, mostly by weekly instalments. As they sat there, Davies could hear the sturdy clothes being moved from their racks which were fixed just below Madame Tarantella's floor. Madame Tarantella herself sat in what she called her driving seat, the little bentwood chair seeming to cling like a child around her skirts. The room was professionally dim with drapes and tassels on the curtains and the signs of the Zodiac on illuminated panels around the wall. On the table with the crystal ball was a used coffee cup, an ashtray full of massacred stubs and a copy of the daily paper open and marked at the racing page.

‘You ought to be on a winner every time,' observed Davies, nodding at the newspaper. He was sitting in the client's chair, his overcoat opened because of the closeness of the small room.

‘Horses? No damn fear,' she sighed. ‘If I could see the winners, I wouldn't be sitting here now, Dangerous. When I try to focus it on Epsom or Sandown Park it turns rogue and gives me one of the back markers. A gift's a gift but it won't get you rich at fifty-pence a gaze. The only fortune that comes up here is somebody else's.' She looked at him speculatively. ‘You wouldn't like to have a consultation while you're here, would you?'

Davies smiled solemnly. ‘I've already met two dark mysterious men,' he said. ‘I've still got the scars.'

‘You'll meet them again, beware,' she warned abruptly. ‘But you will be saved by a beast. Do you have a police dog?'

‘Not a
police
dog. I've got Kitty, a damn ratbag of a thing that spends its life sleeping in my car.'

She nodded, ‘Ah yes, I've seen the beast. You should give it a wash sometime. Look after it, Dangerous. You will need it.' She seemed tempted to take a quick plunge into the crystal but she resisted. ‘And what did Fred Fennell have to say?'

‘You…you knew him pretty well a few years ago? So he told me.'

‘Oh come on, Dangerous,' she replied good-humouredly. ‘You and me are in the same basic business. Knowing about people. You know he was my lover or you wouldn't be in this room now. But it was donkey's years ago.'

‘He's not so bad…physically. In the circumstances.'

‘It's a mental hospital then,' she said quickly. ‘I
felt
he was ill, but I didn't get a fix on a mental hospital.'

‘Well he is. At Bedford.'

‘Oh my. Poor Fred. He was always the big virile policeman, you know. I've seen him standing in this room many a time wearing nothing but his hobnailed boots. A fine sight.'

‘I bet,' said Davies. He wanted her to go on.

‘What about that wife of his then?' she said. ‘Cruel bitch, she was. She had a thing about animals. She'd go out and poison cats and dogs at night. The family had to use force to keep her away from the zoo. Apparently she was in somebody's house once and she tried to strangle their goldfish.'

‘That's not easy,' conceded Davies. ‘Well she must have reformed because she feeds foxes now—on beef sandwiches. Unless she spreads poison with the butter. I hadn't thought of that.'

‘Dreadful woman. Fred used to weep about her. I liked him, Dangerous. But I couldn't see a future for us together.'

‘If you couldn't, who could?' acknowledged Davies. ‘Do you remember, years ago, the case of Celia Norris. She vanished.'

‘Oh her.
That
girl. Yes, I remember, I've still got her bicycle.'

Davies almost fell off the chair. Sweat burst out all over his face. He stared at her. She was idly running her tall fingers over the crystal ball. ‘Her bicycle?' he managed to say.

‘That's it,' she said practically. ‘It's down in my shed somewhere. There's a lot of junk in there but I know it's there.'

Davies tried to keep himself calm. ‘How…how did it come to be here?' he asked forcing his voice to be slow. ‘How?'

‘Fred brought it in,' she said simply. ‘There's no harm in telling you now. If he's in the bin they can't touch him and I bet you'd find it hard to arrest me.'

‘I won't arrest you,' Davies promised desperately. ‘Nobody will, ever. Just tell me.'

‘It was the time of that Norris girl thing. The same night as she disappeared. Fred was up here. I remember it very well. He used to pop up for half an hour or sometimes more when he was on duty. He used to be in the little van that went all around the streets, with another policeman, and they used to arrange so that one of them could hop off for a while. They would take turns. The other chap used to go somewhere, I don't know where, and Fred used to come up here. It started off when he came in to have his future foretold—well, that's what he said. It was his excuse for getting to know me. I was young and rather handsome then. And once he'd given me his hand to hold professionally, I found I couldn't let go of it. It happens, Dangerous, even to us who have extra powers.'

Davies nodded solemnly. He wanted to dance around the room with her but he kept his seat in the chair.

‘He'd had a few drinks that particular night. Been to some police booze-up, again on the quiet because he was supposed to be on duty. They were devils in those days. I wouldn't have trusted a policeman, believe me, except Fred of course.'

‘Terrible lot,' agreed Davies. He did not want to stop her. She was staring at the racing page as if trying to conjure some vision of Mr Fred Fennell from Tipster's Selections from Market Rasen.

‘Yes,' she went on eventually. ‘That night he'd had a few and he only came up for a while. Then he went down and not long afterwards he came back with the bike. It's been here ever since. All these years.'

Davies said: ‘Why did he bring it here?'

‘Well he had just found it. He didn't know whose it was, of course. It was lying by the wall of the cemetery. He'd come across it lying in the grass and he'd brought it here. He was quite clever, Fred, for an ordinary police constable who never got promoted. Or crafty. His idea was to keep it here and then if ever he was found out, you know, if they discovered him here or his wife got suspicious and followed him or had him watched, then he could say he had come after a report of a missing bicycle being found. I would say that I'd found it and hand it over and no one would be any the wiser. It was just a sort of safeguard for him being in here, see.'

‘But didn't he realize whose bike it was?'

‘No. Of course not. He thought it was just a bike—any bike. Lost or thrown away by somebody who had stolen it. It wasn't until later, when the hue and cry was on, that he realized that it belonged to the girl, Norris. And by that time it was too late. He was too scared to take it in.'

Davies hardly trusted his mouth to open. ‘Tarantella,' he said pushing his hand across the table and resting it on hers. Her hand felt cold, dead. ‘Can I see it? The bike?'

‘It's in the shed,' she told him, rising. ‘I'll show you. There's years of rubbish down there. It's behind all that.' She led the way from the stuffy room, down a back staircase and into a corrugated iron shed in the minature yard behind. ‘The rest of the building belongs to Mr Blake of the outfitters,' she explained, pulling back a rusted bolt. ‘But the shed was in with the flat. It was in the lease.'

It was damp and cold in the yard. Davies tugged his overcoat around him and his hand felt his fiercely beating heart. Growing triumph and fear banged like two clappers in his chest. A stale smell came from the shed. ‘I've put a lot of my old things—props and that sort of thing—in here,' she said. ‘You know how fashions change even in this game.' She was pushing aside some painted screens. ‘And here's my clairvoyant stuff, my trumpet and my smoke machine. I packed that in. Gave me the creeps.' She was clearing a way ahead. Davies took the pieces from her as she handed them back.

‘Here it is. I can see it. At the back. Could you get across there, Dangerous?'

‘Try and stop me,' he thought. He moved her gently aside and clambered through the lumber. Then he stopped, surrounded by dust and relics, and looked. It was there. Celia's bicycle. He almost choked with excitement. His arms, as they went across to grasp the handlebars, were vibrating. His face was streaming sweat. Then he got it. He touched the cold, dusty metal. He had got it!

Firmly he lifted and pulled the bicycle away from its surroundings. It was pathetically light. He knew it was the right one. He knew that machine as well as its sad owner had known it. He touched the saddle upon which she had ridden those last minutes of her seventeen years. Carefully, despite his urgency, he lifted it clear of the surrounding junk, and eventually rested it on the clear floor. Madame Tarantella looked at it unemotionally. ‘Both tyres have gone down,' she said flatly.

Davies did not seem to know what to do next. He began to wipe the dust away from the frame with his fingertips. Then he leaned the tubed metal against his thigh and opened the buckles of the saddle bags.

Like a shock it hit him. Inside, brown and broken and brittle, were the remains of a bunch of flowers.

‘They were in there when he brought it,' said Madame Tarantella beyond his shoulder. ‘Chrysanthemums and a few irises. They had a card with them, but I threw that away. I think she must have got them from the cemetery.'

‘Her mother said she brought her flowers,' murmured Davies. ‘I wondered where she picked them.'

‘Flowers,' said Mod softly. ‘Well, well, fancy them still being there.' He was looking into his glass, both he and Davies keeping their heads down from the suspicion and bale in the face of the landlord. He knew who it was who had demolished his drainpipe.