I said, ‘Sorry, of course you know.’
‘Where can I find her?’
‘Copenhagen.’
He paused to reflect, made a slight nod, and wrote it down in his book. ‘And what does Margaret do?’
‘She opens shopping malls.’
He nodded again and enunciated the sentence as he wrote it down. ‘. . . shop . . . ping . . . malls. Excellent. We’re almost finished. You’ve been very cooperative. Now, just one more question, merely routine. ‘Opening shopping malls isn’t really a job, is it?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘If it was, I wouldn’t mind doing it myself. But the thing is, normally they get important people to do it; do you see where I’m heading? So be a sport, tell me who she really is.’
‘She’s the Queen of Denmark.’
‘Wonderful.’ He wrote it down. ‘Queen of Denmark. I think that covers all the formalities.’ He snapped the notebook shut and handed it to a deputy. ‘Get that typed up.’ He watched the deputy depart, then turned back to me. We were alone now, just the three of us.
‘Speaking off the record, I have a little problem. I don’t like your Queen of Denmark story. You know? Somehow it doesn’t ring true. When you’ve been a policeman as long as I have you get a sort of instinct for these things . . .’
‘A hunch?’
‘Exactly. A hunch. And mine tells me the Queen of Denmark story is all poo. Do you feel like changing or adding to it?’
I said nothing.
‘Not feeling talkative? That’s OK. In my experience peepers are never the most chatty of people, but I have a way of dealing with that.’ He walked over to a cupboard and brought out a monkey wrench. A big one. The sort mechanics use to loosen the wheel nuts on giant earth-moving machinery. He waved it in front of me and rattled the bars with it. The muscles of my groin tightened and I took an involuntary step back from the bars. He laughed and walked over to the radiator. He put the wrench on the valve and began twisting it shut. After he had finished he did the three others along the corridor. Then he brought out a long hooked pole and opened all the skylights. The cold, damp air swirled in and the temperature plunged.
‘Brrrr!’ he said.
Miss Evangeline began to shiver violently.
‘Oh yes, I do so like to hear people chattering.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘this is between you and me. Let Miss Evangeline go, or take her to a warm cell. She doesn’t have to suffer this.’
‘Tell me who your client is, you asshole peeper, and we can all go home, including . . . Miss Evangeline.’ He put on a silly accent to say her name and I knew then that it was hopeless. There was no point appealing to his better side: he didn’t have one. He was made from the same stuff as Tadpole: industrial waste from the arsenic factory. He walked to the wall and unhooked the fire hose.
‘OK, I’ll tell you,’ I said.
He grinned and aimed the fire hose at me. ‘Shoot!’
‘She’s . . . er . . . he’s . . . it’s . . . oh, what’s the point? You won’t believe me.’
‘Try me.’
‘It’s someone – I don’t know his name, we meet in secret – but it’s someone from the police, undercover, some sort of secret investigation.’
He laughed. I would have laughed, too; it was pathetic.
He brought the fire hose up and said, ‘Yeah, well, I’ll check that out. In the meantime we’re going to play a party game called Pass the Pneumonia. You can tell me in the morning who your client is.’
‘Oh, Mr Knight, I’m so cold!’
I took my jacket off and slipped it over Miss Evangeline’s shoulders. It was the stupidest thing I ever did.
It took him the bat of an eyelid to work out the implications of my chivalry. Longer than most people would have taken, because he couldn’t understand from personal experience why anyone would want to comfort another person like that. But he knew an opportunity to twist the knife when he saw one. You could trace the progress of the penny dropping by the speed of the grin stealing over his face. He turned the hose from me to Miss Evangeline and turned it on. It knocked her off the bed, and by the time I reached her and tried to shield her she was drenched. He turned out the lights and left. I shouted after him: obscenities, and threats, vile insults to wound his manhood, to goad him into returning; but it was no use. He was wise to that one, too. So I shouted at the skylight; shouted until my voice gave out; hoping to alert someone passing by. But the sound of a man’s cries coming from the police station window is not unusual. Only when it goes suddenly quiet is it really scary.
I read somewhere that an Eskimo who falls through the ice into the water in Greenland has only one chance of survival. He has to run; anywhere will do as long as he runs. If you stand still you freeze to death in under a minute. I didn’t know if it was true; I would have to ask the Queen of Denmark next time she called. I looked at Miss Evangeline shivering and knew she wouldn’t want to run anywhere. At such times you realise how many simple facts about this world there are that you should know but don’t. Is it better to keep your cold wet clothes on or take them off? But the point was academic, I knew she wasn’t going to be taking them off; so I did my best to hold her and keep her warm. She soon lapsed into delirium. She spoke about the horse in the paddock for a while, and gained more lucidity and spoke of the child they took away from her.
‘It was a little girl,’ she said.
‘That’s nice.’
‘I wonder how she’s doing.’ And then: ‘You could find her, couldn’t you? You’re a detective.’ She paused to collect her breath and control the shivering, as if summoning up the strength for one last important task. ‘Couldn’t you?’
‘I suppose . . .’
‘Find her for me, please, Louie. Tell her that her mum didn’t want to give her away, tell her there wasn’t a day when I didn’t think about her. Will you tell her?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘It doesn’t have to be now. Not tomorrow. But one day.’
‘Yes. One day I will find her and tell her.’
‘Thank you.’
It was about 2 a.m. when she died.
The next day Calamity bailed me. It was a bright sunny day: the sky as pellucid and blue as a china doll’s eyes. We stood at the sea railings, leaning against them, hair ruffled by a soft sea breeze, our faces gilded by the watery sunlight. On such days it was a joy to wake up. Sometimes you had to wonder what the gods were playing at.
‘You shouldn’t be worrying about me, you’ve got your own business to run now.’
‘We go back a long way, Louie.’
‘That’s true.’
‘No way I could have left you there. You wouldn’t have left me.’
‘No, but I don’t want you . . . you know, to let things slip. You need to work hard to build a business up. How’s it going?’
‘Oh, pretty slow. Still waiting to hear back from the Pinkertons; can’t really do much until then. Sorry I wasn’t in when you came round.’
‘I haven’t been round.’
‘Oh. Someone told me they’d seen you knocking on my door.’
‘No.’
‘Must have been someone else.’
There was a pause and we were distracted by a man in a sandwich board walking past. ‘HOFFMANN IS COMING,’ it said. The End was, it seemed, no longer nigh. The Apocalypse had been postponed. Calamity made a slight, embarrassed shrug, as if the world had gone to pot during my night in jail and she was somehow to blame.
‘There are a lot of rumours going about,’ she said. ‘They reckon he’s coming. Some say he’ll turn up at the carol concert.’
‘Pure craziness.’
‘I know. Who would fall for a thing like that?’
‘Who?’ Who indeed, I thought. Tinker, tailor, Soldier for Jesus, gaoler . . . Take your pick. The people in the client’s chair have one more stop on the run from the wishing well to the priest.