The Soft Detective Read online

  Just outside the doorway the police surgeon hovered, waiting for enough clothing to be removed from the corpse to be able to carry out his necessary, yet rape-like, rectal temperature-taking. Behind him the coroner’s officer waited his turn, on the floor beside him the long body bag on its stretcher, looking absurdly too big for the little, battered to death monkey-form it was to contain.

  ‘Boss,’ one of the DCs called from beside the french windows.

  He went over.

  ‘Boss, these doors are only just pulled to. Looks like whoever did it could have gone out this way. Don’t suppose that poor little bugger there took a morning stroll in the garden, day like this.’

  ‘I doubt if he did.’

  He went over to the fingerprint officer, busy puffing his clouds of grey aluminium powder on every available surface, occasionally lifting a print on to sticky tape with a little rasping sound.

  ‘Looks as if chummy went out by the french windows,’ he said to him. ‘Might get something from the latch. Or the bolts top and bottom.’

  He turned and peered out through the windows at the fog-wreathed patch of garden. It was miserably desolate. What must once have been a long stretch of lawn, big enough in times long gone for croquet, was now a short ugly area of uncut tussocky grass. It was cut off a dozen yards from the house by a tall concrete-slab fence, no doubt erected when the throughway was built. Borders to either side still supported a few of the shrubs careful owners must have planted long ago. At the far end two clumps of sodden Michaelmas daisies made patches of pallid colour. Once, he thought, the people in this and the similar houses to either side must often on summer days, have gone out through gates at the foot of their gardens to picnic or paddle by the shore twenty or thirty yards away across a sandy track. Now from beyond the tall slabby fence there could be heard only the rumble of heavy-goods vehicles ploughing implacably along.

  Turning away, he saw Detective Sergeant Hastings, solid, fattish, pink-faced, bald head fringed with fair hair, had arrived to organize door-to-door inquiries.

  ‘Jumbo,’ he called out to him. ‘It looks now as if our man may have got away through the garden. Will you supervise a fingertip search first of all? You won’t need more than a couple of sensible chaps, and some aides. It’s a small enough area. With any luck we might turn up something. We’ve precious little to go on so far.’

  Reminded by that, he asked the fingerprint officer if there had been any likely-looking prints on the heavy bookcase where it had been manoeuvred to rest improbably on the edge of the victim’s head.

  ‘You want to be so lucky. Anywhere chummy might have touched has been given a good wipe-over.’

  ‘Telly got a lot to be blamed for,’ he answered wryly. ‘If you had found a print, we could safely arrest the only man in the British Isles who doesn’t know about dabs.’

  The surgeon, he saw, had now finished and the coroner’s officer was supervising putting the tiny, frail corpse into his anonymous body bag, the sound of its metal zip screechingly loud in the subdued atmosphere. He hurried out of the way before the stretcher had to be carried through the dreary hallway and stood on the front step, sucking in breaths of clammy fog.

  ‘Who was it,’ he asked the constable stamping his booted feet by the gate, ‘you said in your message told you about this?’

  ‘West Indian lady who drops in time to time to clean for the old man, sir. Name of Damberry, Mrs Damberry. Works in the corner shop at the end of the road.’

  ‘Right. Yes, good man. If I’m wanted, that’s where I’ll be.’

  Then he halted.

  Should I take March with me? Been looking glum as a wet drum since she came back from calling in the SOCO team. Might make her feel she hasn’t blotted her record for ever and ever.

  He stepped inside again and called her. But as they made their way to the shop, the pavement under their feet chill and slippery, trees in the gardens sullenly dripping, she trudged along in unvarying silence. Gone all the belligerent glances she normally darted to left and right wherever she walked.

  He racked his brains for something to say that might lift her ill humour. Found nothing.

  Not, he thought, what they call a companionable silence.

  From the river mouth came another long, sad foghorn hoot.

  As they negotiated the flapping metal National Lottery sign standing outside the goods-crammed window of the corner shop, bright ads for cut-price offers pasted all over it, he did at last find something to say.

  ‘Take care, when we see this lady, not to let her know we think it’s murder.’

  In acknowledgement March produced a single sharp sigh. Plainly saying I am a detective, you know … sir.

  He cursed himself.

  ‘Oh, poor, poor Mr Un,’ Mrs Damberry, broad-beamed, mighty-bosomed, round-faced, said immediately he had introduced himself. ‘You know, so soon as I saw that light on over his door on my way to work first thing this morning I knew something very wrong. Mr Un, he was always too, too careful of the electric. Just like poor Mrs Un before him.’

  Mr Un, he thought. Mr Unwala. Where the devil have I heard that name before?

  But Mrs Damberry, in generous flood, was going on.

  ‘“Look after him, my dear”. That what Mrs Un say when she went into the hospital. She knew she weren’t never going to come out of there, and she worried sick the poor old man don’t know how to take care of he self no more than a little child.’

  ‘So when was that? Has Mrs Unwala been dead for long?’

  ‘Oh, three year, come Christmas. Three year ago she went. So I said to myself there and then: every blessed Sunday when the shop ain’t open in I’ll go, give the place a turnout, see he got enough to eat in that kitchen, got clean clothes to put on.’

  ‘Last Sunday? You were there last Sunday?’

  ‘Every blessed Sunday I there. And right as rain little Mr Un was then. Right as blessed rain. And now… Now he dead, dead jus’ like what I found him. Under that big, big bookcase. Always reading and reading in those big books of he, Mr Un. But each time I come in, up he look, smile on he little face. ‘“Good day, Mrs Damberry, I trust you’re quite well”’, he say. Funny old way he had to talk. Always the same.’

  ‘So then, when you saw that light in the transom, you went in. You’ve got a key, I suppose?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Mrs Un, she give me that. Mighty fuss that sister of her made when she hear I had it. But then she never set foot in that house, not more than once in a six-month, when Mrs Un was there. So she weren’t never going to go there after she gone. I tell you that.’

  ‘Ah, now, this lady, Mr Unwala’s sister-in-law, is she the only relative he had? Or do you know of any others?’

  Mrs Damberry decisively shook her head.

  ‘Not one single blessed one, less he had some back in India where he ain’t ever been in all the time I knowing Mrs Un, and that be plenty years I telling you.’

  ‘And do you happen to know this sister, sister-in-law’s name and address? We’ll have to inform her, you know.’

  ‘Don’t know no address. But she call Polworthy. Mrs Polworthy. That I do know.’

  He turned to March, stubbornly indifferent beside him.

  ‘Make a note, will you, Sergeant. There shouldn’t be too many Pol worthy s in the town. You could winkle her out in half an hour.’

  Enough encouragement, give her back some self-esteem? Well, has to be. Can’t spare more time than that.

  And just one more question for Mrs Damberry.

  ‘Tell me, did anybody else go to visit Mr Unwala? Anyone else that you know of?’

  ‘No. Not one soul did he know, poor old man. Kept himself to he self. Well, he being diff rent from most folks round here. But she weren’t, Mrs Un. She a white lady liked to talk. How I got to know her, coming into the shop. And him. Sometimes she ask him to go for her.’

  ‘But you can’t think of anyone, anyone at all, who was in the habit of calling at the house? The vicar? Well, no, n
ot round here, I suppose.’

  ‘No, sir, no one calling, not to go inside, ‘cept maybe what he telling me Sunday, some little boy help him catch one of they mice of he when it get out of its cage. But that front door stay shut nowadays all day long and all night too. Only—’

  She stopped abruptly, as if she felt she should check at least for a moment the rush of her spoken thoughts. A moment to ask herself if she should say what she had been on the point of letting pour out.

  ‘Yes?’ he prompted. ‘Only when?’

  ‘Oh, well. Was jus’ the one time. Funny thing, ‘bout four, five week past.’

  Behind him, he realized that March had cast off her gloom, at least to the extent of giving out signs of fretting impatience.

  ‘Four weeks ago?’ he said to Mrs Damberry. ‘Well, I wouldn’t worry about that. I doubt if anything that happened that far off would help us.’

  But he had reckoned without his determined gossip. And, in the face of her relentless ploughing on, he did not quite like to turn away leaving her talking.

  ‘I saying to myself after: that a strange, strange thing. Month go by after month an’ no one going inside that house ‘cept me on a Sunday, and then this happen. There some funny goings-on in this world an’ no mistake.’

  ‘Some funny goings-on?’ he asked, conscious of March resolutely turned to the shop door.

  But with Mrs Damberry exuding, never mind her hosepipe gossipiness, such spreading goodwill he had been unable to abandon his question.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she took him up quickly. ‘That Sunday when I come. Mr Un still sleeping, way he sometimes do if I is good an’ early. But that room of he, you should of seen. Papers all over the floor. An’ - Well, this I don’t like to say. But pee. I know what pee smell like, an’ I know what it look like on the floor. An’ there it was, all over them papers. An’ he ain’t doing that. Not my nice an’ quiet little Mr Un.’

  He was paying full attention now. As, he realized, was March behind him.

  ‘But this was four weeks ago? Or five, did you say? Not more recently? You’re sure?’

  ‘Four, five week, I said. Four, five week it was.’

  ‘And did Mr Unwala have any explanation?’

  ‘Yes, sir. And no.’

  ‘Yes and no?’

  ‘He in bed when I found him, an’ I ain’t sure but I think he got one damn nasty black eye in that little face of he. But “Please don’t ask me about it, Mrs Damberry”, he say. An’ when he ask in that way, so nice an’ polite, then I jus’ don’t ask. An’ I ain’t never done.’

  ‘But it looked as if somebody had been in the house? Perhaps attacked Mr Unwala? Flung papers of his on the floor and urinated on them, is that it? Somebody or several people?’

  ‘U-rine-ated. That the very word.’

  He turned to March.

  ‘What d’you think, Sergeant?’

  But Mrs Damberry had more to say.

  ‘I telling you what I think. I think it were that Hampton Hoard.’

  ‘That old story,’ March muttered.

  ‘The Hampton Hoard,’ he said to Mrs Damberry, ignoring her. ‘I’ve heard a bit about that. My young son is something of an archaeologist. Or anyway a treasure hunter. Expensive metal detector. His hobby. But the Hoard’s meant to be Celtic coins, right? One or two get picked up on the dunes every once in a while, and it’s meant to be a sign there’s a big hoard of them buried somewhere near, just waiting to be found. Worth thousands.’

  ‘That be worth one million pound, sir. One million. That what folks round here be saying.’

  ‘Well, I’m no expert… But have you got some reason for thinking whatever happened in Mr Unwala’s house that time is connected to this hoard?’

  ‘I sure an’ certain have. Poor Mrs Un. She was one of them like that son of you. Archae-what-they-call-them. She goin’ out on they dunes, finding all sorts old coin an’ badges an’ things. She show me once a coin she found. Gold. Pure gold, that what it was. She study all that when she weren’t no more than a girl, you know. Cambridge University. Cambridge University. That where she met little Mr Un. Told me many a time.’

  He remembered the dusty-paned cabinet in the hallway of the house. There had been coins among the objects displayed in it. So to that extent what big, fat Mrs Damberry believed might be the truth. If it had got about that Mrs Unwala had been a trained archaeologist, then the rumour might have spread that she actually knew where the Hampton Hoard was buried, although for some reason - her poor health? - she hadn’t been able to dig it up. And eventually some local criminals might have decided she would have written down the magic location before her death. Had they forced or tricked their way into little Mr Unwala’s house four weeks ago, searched his papers, found nothing? Attacked him when he heard them? And then did they come back last night intending to make the old man tell them what he knew? And had something gone wrong?

  Evidently the same thought had occurred to March.

  ‘You want me to have a look through any papers there are there, sir?’ she said, suddenly all bright-eyed. ‘We just might be on to something.’

  He almost agreed. But no. After all, the whole thing depended on an altogether unlikely rumour. However much it was beginning to excite March. No, those next of kin - if that’s what they were - they had to be found as soon as possible and told about the death. People were owed something.

  He sent her off to the station, and its directories and files.

  Mass of auburn curls soon swallowed up in the still persisting fog.

  Chapter Three

  Benholme did not go back into the house after he had at last parted from Mrs Damberry. His task now, in full charge of the inquiry in the absence of Detective Superintendent Verney on a Bramshill College course, was first to see that everything needed for a Major Incident set-up was in place. Then he had to put the team on it fully in the picture. Do more, however, than just dole out information. He would have to set light to a powder train to lead from relative ignorance to full knowledge of who the murderer was. No doubt in the hours and days ahead that powder train would twist and turn, would jerk and sputter, might on occasion seem to be on the point of damp extinction. But, well lit, it must in the end blaze up its target.

  All seemed to be in order when, the faint greasiness of an early lunch of canteen sausages and chips clinging to his palate, he arrived at the Muster Room. On its normally bare stone floor half a dozen tables had been pushed together to make one long one. Already piles of big Action sheets had been put there ready to be filled in as the inquiry generated more and more tasked actions. Scattered here and there, almost equally necessary, were ashtrays in painted tin, glass, chipped earthenware.

  At the top of the room under the large blackboard, which at straightforward times served a variety of purposes ranging from lectures to cadets to carefully colour-chalked Christmas greetings, a trestle table had been put up for his own use. In-tray and out-tray, notepads, bundle of ballpoints, telephone. Along one of the walls an electrician was installing the last of a bank of other phones. The screens of a row of computers were already glowing.

  Uniformed officers, just in from the house-to-house inquiries, were standing in one corner, faces still red and raw from the foggy chill, voices muttering complaints. In another corner detectives in their current trademark leather jackets chatted more loudly, the word overtime in markedly hopeful tones emerging.

  At the head of the long makeshift table Jumbo Hastings’s, weighty buttocks were planted on a folding chair looking hardly substantial enough for them. Three or four clip-in files, empty now, eventually to be cramfull, lay in front of him.

  ‘Jumbo,’ Benholme said. ‘Here already? Your fingertip searchers in the garden come up with anything?’

  ‘Produced a nice little task for that new aide, the glamour-puss one.’

  ‘Hart. Maureen Hart. Called Mo, if I’m right. Yes?’

  ‘That’s the one. “Sergeant, Sergeant,” she came up to me saying. “Someone
’s vomited down by the fence there. What shall I do about it?” So I told her. Nice fresh puke? Then put it in an evidence bag, sweetheart, every last scrap. Use those spiky red nails of yours if you can’t find anything else.’

  ‘Somehow I think she managed without spoiling the claws, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  And it’s off to Forensic? If it’s down to our fellow and not some wandering idiot poking his head over the fence, might tell us something.’

  ‘It’s on its way.’

  ‘Good man. Anything else?’

  ‘Early days yet, guv. Though I did manage to squeeze out of the doc an approximate time of death. Somewhere in the early evening of Monday. To be confirmed, of course. And there was something else. Something that just might turn up trumps.’

  ‘What’s that then?’

  ‘Footmark. In the muddy earth at the bottom end. It’s not too clear, but it does make it look as if our fellow may have left that way. Would have had to get himself over the fence and made the footprint pushing himself up. If it is him he was wearing trainers, size seven or thereabouts. Just one foot, the right. Whoever it was left no other traces worth a bugger. The grass on that so-called lawn too thick for SOCO to get anything at all.’

  ‘The footmark, you got it lifted?’

  ‘No trouble. Ground just right. Bagged and tagged and off to Forensic. To tell us it’s one sold by the thousand in Woolworth’s.’

  ‘I dare say. But size seven? Gives us something. It’ll be someone small. Could be a woman even. Attack like this not what’s generally seen as a woman’s crime, but…’