The Dreaming Detective Read online

  The Dreaming Detective

  H. R. F. Keating

  © H. R. F. Keating 2003

  H. R. F. Keating has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2003 by Macmillan.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter One

  ‘Who killed the preacher?’

  The chill hostility in the new Chief Constable’s voice as he had shot out the question sent an answering buzz of queries through Detective Superintendent Harriet Martens’s head.

  The preacher? What preacher, she thought, is Mr Newcomen talking about? And why did he shoot out his question the moment I took my seat in front of his desk? And why ... ? Why is he setting out to antagonize me? Look at the way he’s sitting there, leaning sharply forward in that tall, black-leather chair. And look at his hands, flat on the desk, fingers stiffly pointing towards me. Like ... Like, yes, so many plunging kamikaze planes.

  Then, abruptly, the answer to the question the new Chief had snapped out came into her head.

  The preacher. Of course, he must mean the famous Boy Preacher who was murdered here in Birchester, thirty or more years ago. The sweepingly popular figure who at the height of his nationwide ministry had been killed … killed here in the city where his first fame had come to him. Had been murdered, as they say, by a person or persons unknown. Or, if I remember rightly all that I heard about it when I was still at school, by one of only six or seven people.

  ‘Do I take it, sir,’ she ventured, aware that this was the first time she had actually met the Chief face to face, ‘that you’re referring to the notorious unsolved Boy Preacher case here in Birchester back in the sixties?’

  ‘I could hardly be referring to anything else, could I?’

  Yes, hostility. No doubt about it.

  And now she thought that she could guess the reason for it. The rapidly risen Chief must be overconscious of being, as the media has repeatedly told the public he was, the youngest chief constable in the country — damn it, I’m actually a year or two older myself — and so he’s determined to live up to the reputation the publicity has given him, to establish himself as dynamically efficient. And hasn’t he been busy doing that since day one?

  And so, yes, he’s doubly resenting the media attention I have acquired, like it or not. That dreadful label the ‘Hard Detective’ stuck on me ever since I ran my ‘Stop the Rot’ campaign in Birchester’s worst streets. Damn it, without us ever having talked, the man’s conceived a sort of hatred for me.

  Yes, that’s it. He wants me out.

  What’s that husbandly quotation John’s always producing for me? Yes, something about fearing a rival near the throne. So can it be that Mr Newcomen has called me in at this late hour of a Friday afternoon to give me a task he hopes I’ll make an almighty mess of? Even to resigning point? Is he working on a twenty-first-century version of the knights King Henry sent to Thomas a Becket? Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?

  And, of course, the task he’s foisting on me is Birchester’s most famous murder, unresolved thirty years ago and even more impossible to solve now. Who killed the Preacher?

  The Chiefs next words fully confirmed the guess.

  ‘I don’t suppose, Superintendent, that you saw in the Chronicle this morning a small item about the old Imperial Hotel?’

  Harriet had seen it. Birchester’s once most prestigious hotel, the paper said, was at last to be demolished. And the Imperial was the scene of the famous crime.

  But can I up and point out that I, too, regularly read, as part of my duties, the Birchester Chronicle? When, no doubt about it, Mr Newcomen wants to score off me by knowing something that I don’t?

  No, give him his little victory.

  ‘No, sir, I don’t think I saw anything about the Imperial. What’s happening about it now?’

  ‘Work on demolishing that dreadful old pile is about to begin, Superintendent.’

  All right, time to show some signs of knowing what’s what.

  ‘Ah, I see now, sir, why it was you were asking me about the notorious Boy Preacher case. Wasn’t it at the Imperial that the murder took place? You think that before the building’s knocked down someone should take a last look at the scene?’

  ‘I would hardly have drawn your attention to the place being demolished for any other reason, Superintendent. But I think we can do rather better than take a look at the scene. It can’t have escaped your attention that with the advances being made in the use of deoxyribonucleic acid we are now in a position to resolve crimes that have taken place even as long ago as the 1960s. There was that extraordinary development in the Boston Strangler case quite recently, for example.’

  Right, I’m not going to let the fellow try to blind me with science any longer.

  ‘Yes, sir, I read about that, too. Long after the death of a man who had confessed under pressure to a string of sexual murders DNA evidence cleared him of it. That’s what you’re referring to, isn’t it?’

  Bad move.

  The look of resentment on the Chiefs schoolboyish face, that short-back-and-sides haircut, the fresh rosiness of hard-shaved cheeks, became an undisguised glare. Can the man be actually paranoid?

  ‘I’m glad to find you have some knowledge of forensic advances, Superintendent. I had thought your reputation as a detective had been acquired solely in the newsrooms of our local press. That slogan of yours — what was it? — Stop the lot?’

  The rot, the rot. But don’t attempt to correct him. Not that, damn it all, preaching that slogan was a bad thing, not by any means. And, yes, it’s clear now. He’s certainly desperate for publicity.

  ‘But perhaps your knowledge doesn’t quite extend to realizing we are now in a position to do rather more than use DNA to achieve results in cases where, although evidence had been preserved, it was never possible to bring about prosecution with any hope of success. But now with the recent refinements in analysis, all that is changed. I don’t suppose you realize that as recently as fifteen years ago a whole drop of blood or saliva was needed, whereas now the merest trace is enough.’

  Harriet had realized, long ago.

  She said nothing. With a sudden bark of mirthless laughter the Chief went on.

  ‘If such testing had been available in Dostoevsky’s time, Crime and Punishment would have been no longer than a short story.’

  Harriet managed some sort of chuckle in response. It brought an abrupt arrival at specifics.

  ‘Yes, Superintendent. Thanks to us having the top garments worn by every one of those who had access to the Boy Preacher murder scene, we won’t even have to seek DNA matches on the national data base, as other forces have been doing with success. I am told that the person who leant over that young man and throttled the life out of him cannot have escaped being s
pattered with the spittle the Boy would have expelled as he fought against asphyxiation. Of course, thirty years ago there was no possibility of detecting his DNA on any garment that spittle had landed on. But now there is no reason why, after thirty long years, Greater Birchester Police should not bring to justice the man, or woman, who committed that murder.’

  He gave Harriet renewed intent scrutiny.

  ‘Very well, I am tasking you with the inquiry, Superintendent,’ he said. ‘Once the science people have given you a DNA result, go to the man or woman who thirty years ago became soiled with the dead boy’s saliva and get out of them a full confession. I expect a result within two weeks. At the very most.’

  Oh, yes. All very fine, Mr Newcomen, with your unblinking faith in the latest discoveries in forensic science. But what if DNA doesn’t come up with an answer. It well may not, in fact. That spit might not have reached whatever garment the murderer was wearing. And all of those garments, in the course of thirty years, may well have been contaminated in some way. Or the chain of evidence may have lost some necessary link.

  But what then will be the situation for your supposed rival in the media’s affections? My situation? If I come to you, whether in two weeks’ time or ten, and say I’ve not got a result and can’t see how one can be arrived at, then are you going to put it about that the Hard Detective is not after all so very hard, so very successful? That all she’s fit for is whatever lowly tasks can be found for her? If there’s any task at all that she can be entrusted with?

  I rather think that’s what you secretly hope. And I’m not sure there’s going to be any way out of the trap you’ve set for me.

  Chapter Two

  As Harriet left the Chief Constable’s suite, Mrs Balfour, the Chiefs secretary, a police widow, fluffy in both manner and appearance despite her head of rigidly gold-tinted hair, hunted about among the papers piled on her desk to find a book. Mr Newcomen, she babbled out, had told her it was to be given to Detective Superintendent Martens.

  ‘He said it was to be on your — Well, on your way out,’ she waffled on.

  It’s no wonder, Harriet thought, that canteen gossip credits the lady, rightly or wrongly, with seeing the world through permanent hangover muzziness.

  ‘And, yes. Yes, there was something — No, it’s this, the Chief said, the book — it’s precious — was presented to Greater Birchester Police by the author. But I’ve forgotten his name. No, I haven’t. It’s Michael Meadow-craft. There it is on the front.’

  Harriet glanced at the lurid cover of, she saw, Who Killed the Preacher?

  A thank-you-for-nothing gift, she thought. And she found she was even unsure, thanks to Pansy’s stream of confused information, whether it was actually a gift or whether it had to be returned, on pain of terrible condemnation, to the Headquarters library.

  However, she thanked Pansy. And got in return a new spate of breathy directions.

  ‘Oh, and Mr Newcomen wanted me to tell you that — Now I’ve forgotten. No, no. I’ve remembered. I was to tell you you’re to have an office here at Headquarters while you’re investigating all this. For security reasons. I think he said security reasons. He doesn’t want anything in the papers, you know, or not until ... But, I mean, it was all thirty years ago, and I don’t see ... And, yes. Yes, he’s arranging for you to have a detective constable to assist. Yes, assist. I think that was all. The office isn’t quite available yet. It’s got to be cleared of what’s kept — Well, some things have got to … But I don’t suppose ... Well, as it’s the weekend ... ’

  *

  Sitting out in the garden with John an hour later, relishing the last rays of the early summer sun, Harriet confided to him the fears she had about the new Chiefs plans for her. And her rage at how he seemed to have put her into a no-win situation.

  ‘A crime going back thirty years. Thirty years, mind. All right, here and there, every so often, some police force somewhere in the world does resolve a case as old as that. What they delight in calling a cold case. But, however brilliant the scientists are, they can’t use the magic of DNA if there turns out to be no evidence linking a victim from the distant past to a murderer in the present. If it turns out not to be there, it isn’t there.’

  ‘Yes, I certainly see that,’ John said soothingly.

  ‘But what you don’t understand is it’s precisely that which Mr Newcomen’s counting on. Either I find that there’s no result to be had, whatever investigation I carry out on other lines after — Yes, by God — after thirty bloody years. Or DNA does lead me to an arrest, if the murderer of that boy is still alive to be arrested. In the first case Mr Newcomen’ll say I’m not worth the rank I hold, and in the second he’ll claim it as his personal triumph and say that any junior officer could have done the actual work. I’m on a hiding to nothing. I really am.’

  ‘All right, perhaps he has arranged all that. But, you know, it’s likely on the whole that a man who’s risen to the top of his profession as rapidly as he has isn’t quite such a devious character.’

  ‘Oh, isn’t he just? Look, he’s only been in his post for a couple of months, and already he’s roused a hell of a lot of anger. And not only among the lower ranks, whose overtime he’s abruptly restricted and whose dress standards he’s been pernickety about to the point of farce. They call him Mr Newbroom, and it’s not for nothing. But even among the senior officers there’s been plenty of resentment. He preaches, you know. Preaches on any and every occasion, to meetings of CID officers, to traffic officers, to the admin people. He tells officers of my rank, and even above, how they should do their jobs, and implies that before he came along things had been allowed to go totally slack. Which is just not true.’

  ‘Oh, come on. In any organization, not excluding my employers at Majestic Insurance pic, if someone’s been at the helm for too long standards do tend to fall.’

  ‘Okay, okay. I know that. And I dare say some of the things Mr Newbroom wanted changed did need improving. But what I hate, and I know most of my colleagues feel the same, is the way the damn man must always be one hundred per cent right. His methods, and only his, are the ones everyone should adopt, regardless of anything else.’

  ‘All right, I can see that sort of thing rankles. But there are people who want to control, if not the whole world, at least as much of it as falls under their eye. We all of us, in fact, want to control as much as we can. Ideally nothing would ever happen that we hadn’t personally arranged for in advance, or granted permission for. But we don’t live in an ideal world.’

  ‘All right then. So why does Mr Newbroom want to believe that he lives in a world he can control by preaching at it day after day?’

  ‘Well, we all do, to an extent.’ He gave her a wryly amused look. ‘I mean, Harriet Piddock, that Detective Superintendent Martens has been called in her time, don’t forget, Miss Eyemright!’

  Harriet sat for a moment in silence.

  ‘Okay,’ she said at last. ‘You win, John Piddock. I suppose I do believe I get things right as much as Mr Newcomen believes he does. Or almost as much. But I don’t preach about my every passing belief. Or do I?’

  John laughed.

  ‘Not to me, anyhow. And, all right, all right, no, not to anybody as excessively as your Mr Newbroom seems to do. Satisfied?’

  ‘Satisfied. But look at this wretched book he said I was to be given, presumably echoing his view of what happened at the Imperial Hotel thirty years ago. I tell you one thing, I’m damned if I’m going to read it tonight.’

  *

  First thing on Saturday morning, however, Harriet did settle down to go through the 150-odd pages of the fatly bulked-out little volume. It might be, she conceded, a way of getting the basic outline of the thirty-plus-year-old murder into her head. John had gone with some work colleagues out to a farmer who occasionally offered them some rough shooting. So she had the garden — it was another wonderfully sunny day — to herself.

  But a glance through the book’s preliminary pages se
t up in her a fluttering of distrust. Not only did they contain a long list of the author’s previous works — Deplorable Tendencies was one catchpenny title that caught her eye — but the publication date, she saw, was 1969, the same year that the murder had taken place. So, even if the book had not come out until a few weeks before Christmas, with the murder taking place in May, it must have been a rush job, doubtless hurried out to cash in on the heavy press coverage. She remembered that even the solidly serious newspapers allowed through the gates of her school had written of a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie. And how eagerly the senior girls — juniors, of course, were not allowed to see any newspapers — had sucked in every detail.

  A vivid fragment of that past abruptly presented itself. In the prefects’ commonroom they had been sitting round a present someone had been given, something called — the name suddenly came back — a Tennis Court cake. Tennis Court cakes had been all the rage at that time: perfectly ordinary cakes, but topped with a layer of marzipan and then iced, with their whole surface made green by — was it? — chopped pistachio nuts. On them the outlines of a tennis court would be traced in white icing and a little model net would stand up stretched across the whole. But as, with schoolgirl appetites, they had gobbled down generous slices, it was the Boy Preacher murder that was being discussed. What had the other girls said? What did I say? No idea. All vanished. Except for that cake and the memory of everyone’s keen interest in the affair.

  She found now she was having some difficulty in concentrating on Who Killed the Preacher? She had had a bad night. Despite trying to follow John’s tactful advice to forget the dilemma she saw Mr Newbroom as having contrived for her, she had not succeeded with her usual getting-to-sleep routine. She had hardly even, thoughts hammering away, managed its first step: lying flat on her back, shutting her eyes and getting her whole body to relax. Usually after five or ten minutes of that her subconscious would begin to flick on to the screen of her mind one or two of those curious, unrelated-to-anything colourful scraps bubbling away inside. But none had come. She had made herself prowl time and again across that blank dark screen, probing into its deepest corners where sometimes a bright image might lurk. Without result. Wideawake thoughts and fears had forced their way to the front.