Dangerous Davies and the Lonely Heart Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Leslie Thomas

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  About the Author

  Leslie Thomas is one of Britain’s most popular authors. His boyhood in a Barnardo’s orphanage is described in his hugely successful autobiography This Time Next Week. He is the author of numerous other bestsellers, including The Virgin Soldiers, Tropic of Ruislip, The Magic Army, Arrivals and Departures, Running Away, three previous Dangerous Davies titles and, most recently, Chloe’s Song. He is currently completing his next book, Other Times. He lives in Salisbury with his wife Diana.

  Also by Leslie Thomas

  Fiction

  The Virgin Soldiers

  Orange Wednesday

  The Love Beach

  Come to the War

  His Lordship

  Onward Virgin Soldiers

  Arthur McCann and All His Women

  The Man with the Power

  Tropic of Ruislip

  Stand Up Virgin Soldiers

  Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective

  Bare Nell

  Ormerod’s Landing

  That Old Gang of Mine

  The Magic Army

  The Dearest and the Best

  The Adventures of Goodnight and Loving

  Dangerous in Love

  Orders for New York

  The Loves and Journeys of Revolving Jones

  Arrivals and Departures

  Dangerous by Moonlight

  Running Away

  The Complete Dangerous Davies

  Kensington Heights

  Chloe’s Song

  Non-fiction

  This Time Next Week

  Some Lovely Islands

  The Hidden Places of Britain

  My World of Islands

  In My Wildest Dreams

  This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Epub ISBN: 9781446440797

  Version 1.10

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published in the United Kingdom in 1999 by

  Arrow Books

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Leslie Thomas 1998

  The right of Leslie Thomas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1998 by

  William Heinemann

  Arrow Books Limited

  Random House UK Limited

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

  Random House Australia (Pty) Limited

  20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney,

  New South Wales 2061, Australia

  Random House New Zealand Limited

  18 Poland Road, Glenfield

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Random House South Africa (Pty) Limited

  Endulini, 5a Jubilee Road,

  Parktown, 2193, South Africa

  Random House UK Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 7493 1916 X

  For Charlie and Joe Faulkner

  Come walk with me, my love, to Neasden Lane.

  The chemicals from various factories

  Have bitten deep into the Portland stone

  And streaked the white Carrara of the graves . . .

  John Betjeman

  ‘In Willesden Churchyard’

  1

  Walking alongside the mouldy canal on the deep summer afternoon Detective Constable Davies wondered what would happen if the water actually began to flow. A plastic beaker, itself gradually taking sips of filthy water, lolled on the thick surface. Eventually it would sink to the bottom to lie, possibly for ever, down there with ages of sunken rubbish. But if the canal began to move like even the most turgid of rivers, and all the canals in the country did likewise, starting up spontaneously and all at the same time, what a difference it would make to the country. He took a sniff.

  Davies himself was not moving fast. He was bulky and well into middle age. He puffed as he trudged. It had been raining when he left his lodgings that morning and he was encumbered with his macintosh which he had to wear because his arms were occupied with two car batteries, stolen property found as he had expected, lying below one of the bridges. Not for the first time in his career he cursed criminals who stole heavy things.

  Giant summer weeds, almost tropical, swollen green rhubarb and mad cabbage, burgeoned along the tow-path. Steam rose from the thicker growth drifting up to join noxious substances hanging in the north-west London air. There was a sort of yellow-ochre tinge to the clouds, something chemical trapped below them. Somebody ought to have painted the scene. Turner had been a dab hand at that sort of thing. Davies wondered whether anyone like Constable had visited Willesden. It would have been different then, though, real fields and bits of puffy woodland and little hills; hardly a copper or a crime in sight.

  Although the canal did not flow, its route occasionally described a gentle bend. Shuffling around one of them Davies came upon as pretty a picture as he was likely to see that day. Against the urban grey and green a gypsy caravan was drawn up on the tow-path, a horse was foraging among the weeds for fragments of grass, and a huge black kettle was balancing and steaming on a camping gas stove. ‘Ma Daliloquay,’ muttered Davies with a touch of pleasure. ‘South for the summer.’

  An old lady in colour-blind clothes appeared at the caravan door. Davies had known the time when the caravan had been bright with paint and patterned around the frame, but it had faded since Fred Daliloquay had gone to gypsy paradise. That had been some funeral; the men had crazy races, riding half-wild horses through the industrial streets.

  ‘Dangerous!’ hooted the old lady when she saw him. ‘You’ve not come to nick me, have you?’

  ‘Depends what you’ve been up to,’ Davies called forward to her. ‘I only deal with major crime, you know.’

  ‘Up to?’ echoed the gypsy woman as he drew near, her wrinkles twisting into thought. ‘Up to nothing, me. Except I been up Yorkshire way. Nothing else. Do you want a cup of tea before I use the water for my all-over wash?’

  Davies accepted. The water from the huge kettle came out like a bent steel rod and steamed into a crushed teapot. Ma Daliloquay used both hands to lift it and refused his offer of assistance. ‘When I can’t pour a kettle,’ she said, her skinny legs spread out and trembling as she took the weight, ‘I might as well pack it all in.’ She observed his load. ‘Are those batteries working?’

  ‘As far as I know,’ said Davies. He knew the tea would be almost solid and it was. ‘But the bloke that pinched them isn’t.’

  She regarded the batteries as though remembering better days. ‘Like you say, you only deal in major crime,’ she said.

  She gave him the tea in a cracked mug commemorating the Royal Wedding of Charles and Diana, drinking her own from a cloudy glass tumbler. Prince Charles’s face was like a jigsaw. They sat side by side on the splintered steps of the caravan.

  ‘Yorkshire way, I been,’ she repeated. Then, regarding him speculatively: ‘How about your fortune told?’

  ‘You’re still at it?’ Davies stood and walked to the side of the caravan. ‘Madam Daliloquay,’ it said in curly letters. ‘Soothsayer . . .’ The remainder of the sentence was bad-temperedly obliterated by grey paint.

  ‘They made me do it,’ she said.

  ‘I knew the Chief Inspector wouldn’t like it. “Soothsayer to the Metropolitan Police” wouldn’t grab him.’

  The old lady shook her brown head. ‘It wasn’t him,’ she said sombrely. ‘It was my own folk, cousins. They thought “Metropolitan Police” looked dodgy. But I reckoned I deserved it. You remember ’ow I told the coppers who it was owned all that nooky stuff they’d found. And all from the glass ball.’

  ‘I do,’ said Davies although he thought it had been due more to inside knowledge than clairvoyance.

  She rose awkwardly and staggered crab-wise up the steps into the caravan. Davies contemplated the angular horse nuzzling among the nettles.

  ‘’yperion ain’t going to last long,’ she forecast as she returned holding her glass ball. ‘One of us is going but I can’t see who it is. The ball goes misty. Either ’e’ll be clumping on with me stone dead ’olding the reins or I’ll be sitting there and ’e’ll go down in an ’eap.’

  The horse seemed to know he was being discussed and emitted a heavy fart. ‘Nettles,’ said Ma Daliloquay.

  She sat companionably beside Davies on the steps of the caravan. The rotten, sweet smell of the canal and its overgrown banks closed about them. Hyperion munched peacefully; the sky was low, warm and gritty. The gypsy handled her glass ball and then asked Davies to do likewise. He did so and returned it to her. She laid it on her patchwork skirt. ‘It’s not my usual,’ she said. ‘Things got a bit ’ard come the winter, Dangerous, and I had to sell my old ball.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘There’s not a big market for glass balls. I sold it to an antique shop. It was my grandmother’s that was.’ She raised her veined eyes. ‘I ’ope she’ll forgive me.’

  ‘Anyway, you got another.’

  She clacked her false teeth. ‘It’s not too bad. A bit cloudy. It was one of them fishing net floats. From Grimsby. They don’t use them much now.’ She sighed and her eyes almost closed as she looked into it. ‘It’s the seer that matters, not the ball,’ she said.

  Davies sat waiting for her to find his future. They remained undisturbed. Hyperion let out another trump and Ma Daliloquay muttered: ‘Nettles,’ again. Then she appeared to focus on something in the ball. ‘Your life’s going to change, Dangerous.’

  ‘For the better?’

  ‘Can’t tell. It’s this ball. Substandard. But something is going to ’appen and soon.’

  Davies thought it might be the horse again.

  ‘And,’ said the gypsy, ‘now, this is interesting. I see a ship.’

  ‘I’m going on a cruise.’

  ‘No, it’s not like that. It’s an old ship with sails.’

  Two boys on bicycles appeared. They stopped and took in the scene. ‘Go and play cricket, lads,’ said Davies. They rode off and, at a distance, shouted over their shoulders.

  ‘Language,’ grumbled the old lady. ‘My grandmother would have turned them into newts.’ She stared into the ball again. ‘It’s gone now,’ she said a little sadly. ‘The ship has sailed away.’

  For years Davies had lived in a boarding-house called Bali Hi, Furtman Gardens, Willesden. His estranged wife Doris also lived there but on a separate floor. His friend and confidant Mod Lewis, an unemployed Welsh philosopher, named Modest after Tchaikovsky’s brother, was another permanent resident. There were various temporary stayers who inhabited the rooms along the corridors (‘Birds of a passage,’ as Mod called them). The whole solid, shabby, Victorian building was ruled over by the widow landlady, Mrs Fulljames.

  Having deposited the car batteries in his old Rover parked against a canal bridge (its windscreen now embellished with a parking ticket), Davies had returned to Bali Hi where he drove the car noisily and smokily into the area at the back of the premises. In distant days this had been a stable yard for brewers’ horses and, on some days, the faint tang of both ale and animals still appeared to linger. The car was a replacement for an ancient Vanguard which had expired finally on the North Circular Road in the middle of the rush hour at Brent Cross.

  A ghoulish howling came from behind the cracked wooden doors of the old stables. ‘All right, all right,’ mumbled Davies. ‘I hear you.’ A huge bark and bellow echoed around the yard. The animal had once been kept in a railway-arch garage a short distance away but it had been necessary to move him after complaints from disturbed sleepers that he was howling at the nocturnal trains.

  Davies saw the face of Mrs Fulljames pinning him like a spotlight from an upper window. ‘All right!’ he bawled towards Kitty his dog who, not withstanding the name, was male.

  At least if you shouted back the animal had second thoughts. Davies eased the door. It would only scrape open and its slowness always saved him from the yak-like rush which crashed into the broken wood. ‘All right!’ he shouted again. ‘Get back! Go on, get back. Or there’s no walk, no grub.’

  Kitty took the threat seriously and backed off enough to enable Davies to open the door. He went in and the dog pretended a cowardly sideways creep towards his massive basket before swiftly turning and boisterously knocking Davies off his feet. He fought back from the floor and managed to restrain the big animal’s exuberance sufficiently to get up.

  ‘Ma Daliloquay is back,’ panted Davies wagging his finger in the dog’s face. ‘I’ll get her to put a bloody spell on you, you rough bugger.’

  The threat was lost on Kitty but he enjoyed the challenge signalled by the bad language. Backing off to gather his strength he launched himself at Davies again, knocking him to the floor. Breaking his arm in two places.

  Davies’s sling caused scarcely a ripple of interest or a mumble of sympathy at the police station. He was known as Dangerous Davies because, although his reputation was for being kindly, he was invariably sent on assignments when there was no one else available to send, or, more particularly, when no one else wanted to go, the opposition having a reputation for violence. He had been thrown down more flights of stairs than any policeman in London.

  ‘Who done it this time?’ asked PC Westerman who suffered occasional gushing nosebleeds and noticed physical misfortune more than most others. ‘The Kilburn mob?’

  ‘My dog,’ answered Davies morosely. It was his right arm which was fractured and it was difficult to do his paperwork. A tall, chilly-looking man in civilian clothes, whom he had never seen before, came into the CID room and studied him at a distance for some minutes, eventually making a careful entry in a notebook. Davies kept his head down. That sort of thing was worrying.

  ‘At least this time you’re only an out-patient,’ said Mod returning from the library on the day after the incident. ‘They didn’t need to make your usual bed available.’

  At dinner his estranged wife Doris watched with what he thought was an evil satisfaction as he tried to spoon his soup left-handed without slopping it and Mrs Fulljames made it an excuse for giving him a smaller helping of lamb stew. ‘Otherwise it’ll be all over the tablecloth.’

  Jemma, his Caribbean girlfriend who was a social worker and was acquainted with grief, especially his, helped with welcome professional sympathy when he went to her flat. She was a young woman of striking beauty; amazing eyes, fine cheek-bones and forehead, and a disturbing gap in her front teeth. She came from the French West Indian island of Martinique where Napoleon’s Josephine was born. On the night of the Divisional Dinner, held at the Jubilee Clock Restaurant, Jemma helped him to accommodate the awkward arm in the sleeve of his faded dinner jacket. ‘I’ll have to drink left-handed,’ he said.

  ‘A slow business,’ mumbled Mod who had come to watch.

  ‘Does it look all right?’ Davies asked.

  ‘You’re just fine,’ said Jemma in the sort of tone she used with dysfunctional families.

  ‘Like a kangaroo,’ nodded Mod. ‘Carrying young.’

  There were other touches of primitive humour and heavy wisdom at the dinner. It was stag, of course, because of the comedian and the topless belly dancer, but even before this spectacle commenced, a dead hand fell on him. The Superintendent stood to make his usual pedestrian speech, and at the end of it thanked a number of officers who were about to retire. He made a special mention of the long, brave and devoted service of Detective Constable Davies and wished him well in the future. So did everyone else.

  ‘It’s the first I’ve heard about it,’ said Davies.

  ‘Retire!’ exploded Jemma. ‘They can’t make you retire. Not at your age!’

  ‘They can and they have.’ He sat disconsolately on the bottom of her bed. He sometimes called around after a late shift but she had not expected him that night. Even at the door she could see how distressed he was.

  ‘You can take them to the European Court,’ she said.

  ‘It won’t allow coppers,’ he forecast. ‘Coppers are rarely allowed anything.’

  ‘But they never . . .’

  ‘. . . said a word,’ he said. ‘No. Apparently there was the usual administrative cock-up. They should have sent me a nice letter.’ He waggled his arm in its sling. ‘It was this that did it. One bit of mayhem too many.’

  ‘But . . . but you’ve got to appeal. What about your union? You’ve got a union.’

  ‘I pay my subs,’ he said. ‘But there won’t be a lot the union can do. I’ll get my pension and whatever. They’ll make a presentation. The usual, I expect. A bag full of old-fashioned pennies. A hundred coppers. It’s a joke, see.’

  ‘The police,’ she said with disgust. ‘Even criminals don’t treat each other like that.’

  ‘That goes without saying.’

  ‘Come into bed,’ she said running her eyes over all his sadness. ‘Let me make it up to you.’

  ‘That’s kind of you,’ he said rising from the end of her bed. ‘I’ll just get out of this kit. At least I’ll never have to wear a dinner jacket again.’