Last Detective (26 page)

‘Stop it!' he bellowed rising from the chair. He caught his head an idiotic clanging blow on the overhanging hairdrier. He heard her laugh like an echo and cried again. ‘Stop it, Josie. Do you hear me. Stop…'

She did as he asked. She stopped and walked from the light to the dim towards him, on tiptoe. She stood in front of him in the thin dress. He squeezed his eyes together. ‘You shouldn't…' he muttered. ‘For God's sake…'

‘I thought I told you to take your coat off,' she answered practically. She bent over towards him and he could smell the mothballs from the dress. He wanted to touch it, to feel the material, but his hands would not move. She undid the clumsy buttons on his overcoat and divided it open. The, she climbed on to his lap, in a kneeling position, her thin knees on his trousers, her body like a twig, her arms slim around his thick neck, her face looking intently into his. He could not stop himself then. He allowed his hands to touch her, bringing them around, still encased in the ridiculous tunnels of the overcoat sleeves, and resting his fingers on her hips. The feel of the gingham went through him like a shock. So thin he could feel her hipbones protruding like a cowboy's guns. ‘Oh hell…' he said hollowly. ‘Oh bloody hell.'

At that she moved her face to his, smooth against tough, and pressed her thin body into his chest. His hands fell down the murderous dress and enveloped the softness of her naked bottom. He held her there while they both trembled. He could feel her young tears running down his face. He pulled her away and looked at her. Her smudged face and the clothes.

Had Celia wept that night long ago?

In the CID room at the police station the detectives were all trying on suits, the proceeds of a thwarted robbery. There was an atmosphere akin to the fitting room of a busy tailor's shop, with comparisons of cloth, style and cut, being bandied about. Davies sat down quietly and wrote a short and almost entirely fanciful report of his efforts to locate Ramscar.

‘Pity there wasn't an overcoat among this stuff, Dangerous,' observed one of the young, successful, detectives, smart in a pinstripe. ‘Yours is going green with mould.'

‘It's comfortable,' shrugged Davies, putting his report in the file for Inspector Yardbird's office. ‘I've sort of settled into it now. I don't think I could get used to a new one.' He left them to their fashions and went out and walked towards the cemetery.

It was a good day for visiting the dead. A damaged sky scattered over his immediate area of the world, a sky black but riven with chasms of jagged sunshine, a sky shrieking with dark winds. Wagner might have put it to music.

Davies, however, whistled a simple but jaunty sea-shanty (‘Come cheer up my lads, 'tis to glory we steer') as he parked the Lagonda in the half-circle of road at the cemetery gates. The grave keeper came immediately from his small mausoleum-like house at the gate and pointed at the car. Kitty, the unfumigated Kitty, raised itself blandly and blindly in the back seat, looked around and with a surge of disinterest fell down again to customary sloth.

The keeper pointed at once an accusing finger at the car. ‘Can't you dump that thing somewhere else?' he demanded. ‘It gives this place a bad name. And I can smell that dog, or whatever it is, from here.'

‘I suppose I've got used to him,' grimaced Davies mildly. ‘I won't take a couple of minutes of your time.' He was tempted to add, ‘I just want to inquire about digging up a few graves.' But tact prevented him.

‘What is it?' demanded the man. He stood posed between a large laurel and a weeping elm. Davies realized how well trees and shrubs did in this particular plot and felt a distant shudder. The keeper sniffed. ‘I hope you don't want to hang around the cemetery all night again, like last time.' He laughed, almost a snarl. ‘Whatever heard of anybody threatening to blow up a place like this!'

‘Ah,' said Davies, ‘I am glad you mentioned that, friend. I'm afraid that was an administrative error.'

The man got half-way to putting a protective hand on the nearest bent headstone, but stopped himself. ‘What is it you want, this time?' he asked.

‘I wondered if I could just have a look at the registers, the Record of Burials, or whatever they're called in the profession,' asked Davies. He smiled grandly as though requesting a list of prizewinners. ‘You've got them, I take it?'

‘Of course, we've got them,' replied the man. ‘Otherwise we wouldn't know
who
was bloody
who
, would we?'

‘That's logical,' agreed Davies.

‘It's official police business then?'

‘Naturally,' lied Davies. ‘Would I do this for a pastime?'

The keeper turned and went back to his house, leaving Davies looking around him at the memorial stones, the final imprint of men upon earth. Some of them were quite old and he had to get close to read the inscriptions. Keys sounded behind him making him start. ‘It's around the other side,' said the keeper. ‘The registry.'

On the short journey to the place where the records were kept he seemed to unbend a little. Perhaps he was one of those persons who cannot bear to walk in silence with anyone, even in a cemetery. ‘It's fucking cold this morning,' he said.

Davies remembered him swearing the time before and wondered whether foul language came readily to people who worked among those who cannot listen. It was the man's only comment, however, and he unlocked the registry door with a surly twist of the keys. They walked into a long, icy room lined with racks and heavy ledgers. There was a writing desk with a green baize top, an inkstand and an ominously empty chair. Davies imagined the skeleton figure of Death crouched there at night over his ledgers. He declined the keeper's invitation to sit down.

‘Who was it, or when was it?' asked the man.

‘Who—I don't know,' said Davies awkwardly. ‘But it would be July 1951. About that.'

‘About that!' retorted the keeper. ‘You don't know
who
it is—and you don't know
where
and you don't know
when
!'

‘We're struggling a bit on this one,' admitted Davies. He pulled at his nose thoughtfully. ‘Can I ask you—how long before a burial is the grave actually dug?' He wondered why the man showed no arousal of interest in the inquiries.

‘Depends,' was the dull answer. ‘If we're going to have a rush we might get them done a few days in advance, but normally it's just the day before. It's a business that just ticks over.'

‘Well, in that case,' decided Davies. ‘Could we check the burials for the 24th, 25th, 26th of July, 1951.'

The man assumed his customary crumpled expression, sighed, but went along the racks until he came to the appropriate book. Davies watched him and, looking along the moribund shelves, fancifully thought that tasteful notices saying ‘Thrillers', ‘Romances', ‘True Life Adventure' might cheer the place. The man came back with a thick ledger. ‘Quarter for July to September,' he said thumping the book down. ‘I'm glad it wasn't a winter quarter, this is bleeding heavy enough.'

Davies took the occupational grumble with an understanding nod. He sat at the empty chair, now without thinking, and with compressed eagerness began to turn the pages. He reached July 24th, three entries, two on the 25th, three again on the 26th. He borrowed a pencil from the keeper and finding, for once, his notebook wrote down the names.

‘Would these graves be all in more or less the same area? he asked.

The keeper nodded. At last a touch of interest was germinating in his face. ‘What's it all for anyway?'

‘Just routine inquiries,' replied Davies unconvincingly. ‘Which part of the place?'

The keeper checked the book over his shoulders, looking at the serial numbers. ‘North-west corner,' he said. ‘It's not used now.'

‘By the wall?'

‘Yes. Well more or less. There's a bit of green this side of the wall, then the path, then this section.'

‘Where are all the tools kept?' asked Davies suddenly. ‘The spades and such like.'

The man was beginning to look surprised. ‘Tools? This is a funny business, isn't it? Tools? Well, they're supposed to be kept in the central store shed, but more often than not they're left out. The blokes you get on this job, they just leave them against the wall or even in the grave. They haven't got a lot of interest or pride in the work, and they bugger off as soon as they can, leaving the tools until the next day. Half the gardens around here have been dug with spades nicked from this cemetery.'

‘It gets better,' said Davies to himself. He looked at the man. ‘So if that area of the cemetery was being worked, as it were, eight burials in three days, then the tools might well be left there.'

‘They could have been.'

‘Right,' said Davies rising. ‘Thanks very much. I'll be off.'

The man was now eager to ask about it, but Davies, wrapping his overcoat like silence about him made only noncommittal answers. As they approached the gatehouse again he noticed the yellow splash of an excavator a few hundred yards away across the petrified causeway of headstones.

‘What are they doing over there?' he inquired.

‘Doing some business with the road,' replied the keeper. ‘They've had to move the wall over. And dig up some old graves. I don't hold with that, digging them up.'

‘Nasty job,' commented Davies.

‘In the olden days,' replied the keeper, apparently glad to dispense some graveyard history, ‘they had to get the labourers drunk on whisky before they'd take it on. It was very smelly and so on. But now they've got chemicals and suchlike. But I still don't reckon it.'

They had reached the gate now. ‘Ever had an exhumation order carried out here?' Davies asked casually.

Shock smothered the keeper's face. ‘Oh no,' he said. ‘This is a respectable cemetery. Not for donkey's years. Long before my time.'

‘Be quite difficult to get eight exhumation orders, I imagine,' said Davies, beginning to walk towards the car.

‘Eight!' The keeper appeared likely to faint. ‘Eight exhumations! Over my dead body!'

‘That's what I thought,' said Davies. ‘Thanks anyway.'

Without answering the man turned towards his house, glancing back suspiciously towards the exiting Davies. ‘Mad,' he said. ‘Absolutely fucking mad.'

Davies got into the Lagonda and thoughtfully started the engine. But he did not put the car into gear. There was something wrong. Slowly he turned and, leaning over, lifted the edge of the tarpaulin and exposed the crouching Kitty underneath. Kitty was gnawing a large bone.

‘Listen,' said Davies to Mod. ‘If our idea is right, if our murderer caught Celia Norris in the cemetery when she was stealing the flowers, or saw her going over the wall, or coming back, or whatever, did his nasty business, and then buried her in an already dug grave, then we've got to dig up eight coffins.'

‘A formidable task,' agreed Mod. They were slouching along to ‘Bali Hi', Furtman Gardens, having had to miss their evening drink because Mod had been kept late at the Labour Exchange. An emergency matter had arisen and there was a strong threat that he might be offered a job. He had managed to overcome it, however, before he left for home.

Mod, who never wore an overcoat, never having owned one, was walking comfortably in a sagging purple sports jacket and an open-necked shirt. Davies was curled like a large, walking chrysalis in his brown coat. ‘The trouble is,' said Davies. ‘No matter how far fetched it seems, the opportunity and the props were all there. That was the part of the cemetery being used at that time, there were several open graves, and the tools were most likely left lying about. He could have raped her, or whatever, killed her and then dug a foot or so deeper into an already dug grave and buried her in there. So that the next day the coffin it was intended for was put in on top of it, and the whole lot buried for good. And the whole thing could have been done in the best possible conditions—at night and in peace and quiet. There's nowhere more private than behind a cemetery wall.'