‘It broke her heart, it did, having to turn Miss Evangeline in. You should have seen the trouble I had getting her to fill out the witness statement.’
‘And I bet she’s the only witness, too.’
‘I’ve got a witness and the evidence of the stolen money. I’ve got enough to be going on with. She’ll get her day in court. If she’s innocent, if it’s all just a terrible miscarriage of justice – and let’s be honest, these things do happen now and again – then she’ll walk.’
He flicked open a notebook and consulted his notes. ‘Now, suppose we forget the bleeding-heart stuff and concentrate on the matter in hand, namely the nature of your connection with the two deceased Moth Brothers. Tell me what they were doing in your office. And please don’t pretend they weren’t there.’
‘They came to confess to the murder of Father Christmas.’
‘That was nice of them. Now, why would they do that? As opposed, for example, to confessing to the proper authorities, i.e. me.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I don’t like that answer, Louie.’
‘I don’t like it, either.’
‘OK. Suppose you tell me the name of your client.’
‘Her name’s Margrethe Glucksborg.’
‘Margaret . . . ?’
‘Glucksborg. With an umlaut.’
‘With a what?’
‘Two little dots above the u.’
‘You think I don’t know how to spell Glucksborg?’ Something flashed in the pools of Erw’s eyes when he said that. It could have been the shiny silvery belly of a trout dashing through the sundappled waters, but I didn’t think so. I think it was the switchboard sparking angrily when no one is in attendance; the dancing blue flame that says this man is totally mad and is capable of killing someone over the perceived insult of not knowing how to spell Glucksborg.
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 . . .’
