The Soft Detective Read online

  H. R. F. Keating

  The Soft Detective

  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 One

  With the personal radio message headed Fatal in his hand, Detective Chief Inspector Benholme heard Sergeant March’s voice through the open door of the CID Room. She sounded, as always, as if she was shouting down a stroppy bunch of yobbos.

  ‘What’s he like, the DCI? I’ll tell you: soft as a duck’s arse.’

  He checked himself.

  Best not to go in right on top of that. Not that it’s going to embarrass March, me overhearing. Embarrassment and Di March poles apart. But one of the aides, newly arrived today, must have been asking about me and for them it would be awkward enough.

  And is it true? Me, soft?

  No, it’s not. I suppose she has got a bit of a point. I’ve never gone in for Phil Benholme right or wrong. Can always see the other point of view. Which, damn it, makes me a good detective, gets me into witnesses’ minds, criminals’. But… Well, there’s a flip side to it. Vicky, would she and I still be together if I’d stopped myself always seeing her side? If I’d said bluntly You married a copper, you’ve got to put up with what goes with that, long hours on duty, sudden call-outs? Instead, when she went waltzing off, she must have thought ever-understanding Phil’s going to understand this.

  And she did have a lot to put up with, after all. Not only the lonely evenings, just her and young Conor, with him often tucked up in bed. Not just the unexpected extra hours, the outings cancelled at short notice. But times like, back when I was a DC and attended the corpse of that woman her husband had mutilated, and wasn’t able to make love for two whole months afterwards.

  Yet if when she went on at me I’d shot back in the same way, given her the no-question-I-am-right response, would that really have kept the marriage going? God knows.

  And should I be equally tough in the job? Hard-arsed? Slam out orders, hell with reasons. There’s plenty of senior officers do. But, no. No, damn it. No, I run a good ship, way I am. I do think of others, their reactions, what they must be feeling. And it makes the CID all the better. More bloody efficient.

  So, you’re wrong, Detective Sergeant March. My way something you should think about, if you ever think about anyone but yourself. And perhaps you do. Occasionally.

  He went forward.

  And, almost inside the door, realized that, if no one else in the room had seen him standing there, DI Carter at his desk at the top certainly had. And was enjoying the situation. Remnants of a smile on his face. And he’ll be watching to see how I react. See if, say, I send March down to this fatal he’s got his copy of. By the look of it just some poor old geezer conking out. See if I use it to get back at March? Do the put-’em-in-their-place senior-officer act? Give her this tuppenny-ha’penny task so she’ll learn some respect.

  But, no, damn it, I won’t. No. I’d thought this barely worth sending a DC to. And I’ll stick by that. Bob Carter or no Bob Carter. Discipline fanatic, see no further than his nose.

  In the room he went straight over.

  ‘Bob, this fatal down in Sandymount, I think we’d better just have a look-see. Bad area, after all.’

  ‘Yeah. Was going to suggest it. Got plenty of bods with nothing better to do this happy morning.’

  Outside, fog swirling densely up from the river mouth as so often in King’s Hampton had reduced everything to blotchy greyness.

  ‘Well, Phil, who d’you want sending?’

  Hint of malice in that too-innocent look.

  ‘Oh, just any DC. Or, wait, no. No, might be something for one of the new aides to cut their teeth on.’

  He paused.

  ‘And in that case you’d better give it to March if she’s not tied up. Needs someone who knows their way about, show them how the job should be done.’

  ‘Oh, March is free all right. I’d sent her along to that big rally in the Town Hall last night, neo-Nazis, neo-Fascists, whatever those black-mac stirrers call themselves. Thought she might be able to pick out some of the thugs been causing trouble in the town. No go, of course. But her report, all neatly typed up, on my desk first thing. You know Miss Efficiency.’

  Carter sent a swift glance down to the other end of the room where Di March, tall, well built (as they say), mass of auburn curls cascading down to her shoulders, dressed a bit butch in jeans and leather jacket, sat talking in low tones to the new female aide. Now there was more than the hint of a smile on his heavy-jowled face.

  Hell with him. Sending an aide to this little task under the eye of the only DS available the sensible thing to do. So do it. And never mind steamroller Bob Carter. I’m not, as a matter of strict fact, getting at Di March, whatever Bob’s smirking about.

  An hour later, reading the minimally bare report radioed in by March, he began to think he should have a go at her after all. With good reason now. She had left looking sullen enough to have guessed her duck’s arse remark might have come to his ears, and in consequence her message was almost a direct duplicate of the beat officer’s, not one single new circumstance in it. A deliberate piece of insolence. Cocking a snook.

  Right then.

  He sent a brief reply telling March to stay where she was till he came, and went down for his car.

  Go to the scene. First of all, get rid of whichever aide had attended. Don’t want to give March abollocking in front of a junior. Next, take a quick look round, note anything March should have reported, and point out to her just where she’s gone wrong. All right, perhaps understandable she felt aggrieved at what she thought was a petty punishment. But no excuse for deliberately slipshod work. She’s a good detective all right, stands no nonsense, gets to the heart of things. And I don’t care a bugger if her comments at a briefing sometimes verge on lack of respect. But now she’s gone too far. Not doing her job. All right, like as not there’s no more to the business than that first report indicated. But she should have told me just why.

  In the fog the trip took him almost twice as long as it should have done. But at last he neared the estuary and the sea beyond and heard the mournful foghorns of the ships waiting there. Into his mind there came vague pictures of huge prehistoric beasts calling to each other across wide steamy swamps.

  So it was much later than he had expected when he pulled up outside number twelve Percival Road, a house, as far as he could make out in the murk, though badly in need of repainting something of an exception to the generally run-down appearance of the whole of the area. Once one of King’s Hampton’s pleasanter parts, since a traffic-thundering six-lane road was bulldozed along the banks of the estuary Sandymount had become almost derelict. Its big old houses had been sold, split up into flats, left neglected. Many were occupied by squatters. Others had been taken over by West Indians and a small crowded community of Pakistani families. In consequence the entire place was now a policing headache. Saturday-night violence, drunkenness and not a little drug dealing, all the way from selling teenagers a few Ecstasy tablets to crack cocaine.

  But number twelve had no crazy array of bell pushes beside its door. No faces were peering from behind tattered cur
tains. No broken pushchairs, stolen supermarket trolleys or remains of bicycles littered the front garden. Even most of the path’s pattern of black and red tiles was more or less intact.

  He wondered why the place had survived so comparatively well.

  With a nod to the constable who had originally reported the death, standing muffled up in his greatcoat just inside the old cast-iron gate, he made his way up to the front door. Finding it just ajar, with ears cocked for Di March’s loudspeaker tones he entered a long, darkened entrance hall, furnished only by a display cabinet, a few tarnished museum-like objects dimly visible behind its dusty panes.

  Then he heard that loud voice from somewhere in the gloom ahead.

  ‘Look, we’ve given him long enough. I’m off. There’s real crime to be detected out there, if anyone’s got the guts to go after it. You stay on, laddie, and tell him whatever it is he’s taken it into—’

  But twice quite enough for overhearing things I shouldn’t.

  ‘Sergeant March, you there?’

  As if I don’t know. But keep up the fiction.

  ‘Ah, here you are, sir.’ A loudly muttered at last. ‘It’s the door at the end.’

  It opened as he approached and one of the new aides poked his head out.

  What’s his name? Yes, Johns.

  ‘So, beginning to learn the ropes, are you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Right then. Just nip out to my car, and sit there in case I get any messages.’

  Then into the room, to deal with sulky Sergeant March.

  Yet it was not March who first claimed his notice. It was the dead man. Not that as a body his was in any way horrifying. It was, in fact, the very lack of signs of violence that held his attention. Although the big bookcase, which in falling had brought about the death, still lay on the head half hiding a fringe of white hair, the whole body, tiny in size, looked perfectly tranquil. Curled up like a sleeping child’s among the jumble of books spilt on the floor with light brown hands loosely clasped, it had the air of being a quiet little dressed-up monkey.

  After a long moment he turned to March.

  ‘Well, do we even know who he is?’

  ‘Yes, sir, we do. Now. I got hold of a neighbour a few minutes ago. They’re all our ethnic cousins round here and, as you can see, the old guy’s some sort of Indian himself. But, from what I was able to make out, his name’s Unwala. Unwala, would you believe?’

  ‘I see,’ he said, deciding not to rebuke March for our ethnic cousins. ‘And do I gather Mr Unwala lived alone? You having to ask a neighbour.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I reckon he was going to that bookcase to take something out, and brought the whole thing down on himself, tugging at it. You can see the shelves all round the room are jammed tight.’

  True, long, waist-high bookshelves on either side of the fog-smeared french windows - cages of some sort on top of them - were packed tight with dingy-spined volumes by the hundred varied by a sprinkling of bright modern jackets. He began to go over to see if the titles would give him an idea what sort of a person the dead man was, a thin chill stream of fog-tinged air reaching him from two small top windows as he got nearer. But he stopped, struck by a thought.

  ‘Sergeant,’ he said, ‘has it escaped your attention that there are books scattered over the floor all round the body?’

  ‘No, sir. I have got eyes in— No, sir, I did notice that.’

  ‘And what inference did you draw?’

  ‘Infer— Oh, God. God, yes. The bookcase on the floor can’t have been as jammed up as the others or the books would have stayed in it. So it wasn’t trying to pull one out that … But— Well, it could have fallen on him for some other reason.’

  But while she had been speaking he had knelt by the body and taken a more careful look. It had made him come to an unnerving conclusion.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there could be any number of reasons why a heavy bookcase like this might fall over. But, however it happened, the dent in this poor old fellow’s skull should have come where the top edge struck him, and the bookcase is quite the wrong height for that. Besides which, if you look closely at the carpet here, there’s what looks like a faint scrape mark.’

  He got to his feet.

  ‘No, Sergeant, the bookcase has been moved. Moved so it would seem this poor devil was killed in a chance accident. What we’ve got here, almost certainly, is a murder.’

  Through the open top windows there came a single long sad foghorn hoot from out in the estuary.

  Chapter Two

  March, her cascade of curls seeming distinctly subdued, sent off to radio for the Scene-of-Crime team, Benholme began to prowl and peer in the grey, fog-obscured light. Faint scratching sounds coming from the cages on the wall bookshelves drew him over. Peering forwards, hands in pockets to avoid any touching, he saw each cage was occupied by mice. White mice. Oblivious of his presence, and of that of the tiny corpse on the floor, they scuttered to and fro endlessly rapidly eating, though there seemed to be little enough left for them. The cages, he noticed, had numbers in the hundreds on them, written in neat script on yellowing labels.

  So, Mr Unwala a bit of an eccentric? Keeping these pets? Observing their little scampering lives?

  But that name Unwala, it seemed to ring a faint bell. For a moment or two he puzzled about it, but soon gave up. If it meant anything, sooner or later it would come back to him. In the meanwhile … Whoever had killed the old man might have gone into the other rooms in the big old house, have left there traces of himself.

  He set off to explore. A dining room, of course, in a place like this. But it showed every sign of years of non-use. Its flowered wallpaper was dimmed almost to nothingness. The bare heavy table was dull with a deep layer of dust, as was the mahogany sideboard on which stood a brass flower vase sprouting a bundle of withered, time-dried stalks. The kitchen, when he moved into it showed no signs of anything untoward, nothing an intruder had broken or displaced. A faint lingering odour of oriental spices gave some evidence of daily use. Then, what estate agents call ‘the usual offices’, the term seemed right for this now vacant house. Again there were signs of use, a fairly recent application of floor polish and the air tangy with squirt-on toilet cleaner.

  Going up a floor, the first room he entered, expecting to find a bedroom, turned out instead to be equipped as a small laboratory, though what sort of work it was designed for was beyond him. But there was a chemicals-stained bench and on it some retorts, a rack of test tubes and a brass-fitted balance under a square glass cover. In a corner stood a piece of grey-painted equipment, the purpose of which, again, baffled him. And, once more, there seemed to be no trace of any intruder. The other bedroom on this floor was also a laboratory, though this showed even fewer signs of active use than the one next door. On its workbench he saw places where the mouse cages below might once have been ranged, rectangles less dusty than the area round them.

  So what had this Mr Unwala been up to? He must be, or have been, pretty well off to have bought all this apparatus. But what had he used it for? What was he still using it for when he met his death? Some hobby? Turning base metal to gold? Well, no. Perhaps years ago he had been some sort of scientific consultant, though it was hard to guess what he might have been advising on.

  But, if he was in fact well off, would rumours have got about, round here in now seedy Sandymount? Had someone broken in to look for some talked-about cache of money? And had little Mr Unwala disturbed him?

  But there had been no sign of forced entry. Could someone then have wheedled their way in? Someone pretending to be an unemployed vendor of items of household equipment? But, again, Sandymount was hardly the place for that sort of enterprise.

  A quick look into the bathroom. Empty. Forlorn. Out of use. A long rust stain running down from one of the heavy brass taps of the big, lion-footed tub.

  Up to the top floor, still puzzling.

  Another bathroom, not as large as the one below and with less elaborate fit
tings. But it looked as if it had, unlike the other, been in regular use. A tablet of soap on the basin still faintly sticky. A towel damp to the touch. Next door he found a smaller bedroom than those on the first floor, a room he guessed that in days gone by would have been occupied by a servant. But now it held just one rather small single bed. An effort had been made to pull up the bedclothes on it, not very successfully.

  So this must be where the old man had slept. A well-worn pair of plaid slippers, small enough to be a boy’s, were half-tucked under the bed.

  But why did he sleep here when there must be a larger bedroom looking out over the estuary? Perhaps the noise of continuous traffic on the throughway had driven him out?

  It was only when he crossed the landing and opened the door opposite that he understood the real reason. The room was almost pitch-dark, heavy curtains across its windows. But when, taking, a ballpoint from his pocket he carefully clicked down the old-fashioned brass switch, the light from a single dim bulb in a parchment shade - could it be only forty-watt? - showed him a big brass-ended double bed, fully made up but plainly left long unused. Its faded puffy silk eiderdown was carefully in place, its pillows were marble-smooth but no longer white as they must once have been. Instead they were the yellow of long-unbrushed teeth.

  So old Mr Unwala must once have been married, have slept beside his wife here. Then she must have died. And he, unable any longer to bear the sight of their shared bed, had set himself up in the little room over the way. Leaving untouched, unseen, this bed that looked even more deserted than his own one at home, duvet so decisively flung off just three months ago by his Vicky. Now no longer his Vicky.

  And there were certainly no signs of anyone having entered this room before him. On the ornate rosewood dressing table, its mirror a mass of fuzzy starring, silver-backed items of a woman’s toilet set lay, dust-obscured. And untouched.

  When he got downstairs again he found the Scene-of-Crime team had arrived and most of its members were already at work. The photographer’s flashbulbs were intermittently flooding the whole scene with sudden dazzles of cruel revealing light: worn carpet, old-fashioned roll-top desk, volume-crammed bookshelves, the mouse cages above them. The video operator’s camera was already whirring, capturing the wretched scene with equal blank disinterest. Beside the body the Scene-of-Crime officers, in their pristine white bulging paper coveralls, putting plastic bags over the deep-dented head and tiny pale brown hands, seemed to transform the shabby room into some hallucinatory science-fiction illustration.