Gerald Kersh - Prelude To A Certain Midnight

‘Couldn’t accept it, ‘m. Find the man if we can, in any case.’

‘Look here!’ Asta bellowed, holding the detective-inspector back as he tried to go out. ‘A little girl is murdered. Have you got any daughters?’

‘Two.’

‘If one of your daughters was Sonia Sabbatani, what’d you do?’

‘What I’m doing now,’ said Turpin. ‘That’s what I’m here for.’

‘Here,’ said Asta, ‘here a child is murdered —’

‘Listen, Madam,’ said Detective-Inspector Turpin, ‘do listen. This murder was, as they call it, a Sex Murder. That is to say, a sort of a murder without obvious motive —’

‘The motive is obvious!’ said Asta Thundersley, getting hold of the detective-inspector’s lapels. ‘Sex is the motive, rape is the motive, beastliness is the motive!’

‘Quite so. You know how these things are, don’t you? Some of the nicest people go in for that kind of thing — there’s no way of identifying them. Is there, now?’

‘Bah!’

‘Ask yourself, Miss Thundersley,’ said Turpin, ‘if it’s as easy for us as you seem to think. As you say, sex is the motive — beastliness as you said just now, and quite right too. Well now, you see, almost anybody might commit a crime like that. Respectable fathers of families have been known to, er, commit certain offences against children. People you’d never suspect are always strangling ladies of easy virtue with silk stockings, for instance. This sort of murderer is the hardest sort of murderer to lay your hands on, because he’s not a habitual criminal. He is not known to the police. A burglar, or a forger, or a confidence trickster — he leaves, as you might say, his autograph on his work. A certain kind of thief might be specially expert at opening, say, Yale locks with a bit of celluloid. Or another might, as a skilled craftsman, have his own particular way of cracking a safe. They can no more change their style than you or I can change our handwriting or our fingerprints. They give us something to work on, and sooner or later we make an arrest. And besides, in the criminal world there is always somebody or other who will give information to the police; or at least somebody we can get information from in one way or another. But the sort of men that do jobs like this Sabbatani job, they’re lone wolves. Ordinary, clean-cut crooks hate and despise them. They’re always the last sort of people you could possibly suspect. For all we know the man who killed that poor kid is having a quiet drink in this bar at this very moment. Or perhaps he’s too respectable to hang about in bars: perhaps he believes it’s wicked to drink. Or perhaps he’s hard at work earning money to keep his mother, wife, and children. Or he might be a doctor, at a lying-in. Or a tramp on the roads. There is no earthly way of saying, is there? That’s where our headache comes in, don’t you see? But don’t you worry, we’ll get him in the end.’

‘Oh, yes! Of course you will get him in the end! Bah! Don’t talk to me! I know you. I know the police. They couldn’t even catch a cold. I know them. Oh, they’re remarkably efficient when it comes to picking up some old hag, paralytic-drunk on Red Biddy; or running in somebody without visible means of support, or lying in wait for tarts in Gerrard Street. But when it comes to a murder —’

With some amusement Turpin asked: ‘As a matter of curiosity, ‘m, I wonder what you’d do in a case like this if you were the superintendent. God forbid. Here are your facts: little girl goes to school. In the afternoon thick fog comes down, real London pea-souper — can’t see a hand in front of you. Four o’clock comes, the little girl doesn’t get home. Mother, worried, goes to the school to meet her, with a torch. School is in Ingersoll Road, half a mile away through half a dozen dark dirty streets. Mother gets to the school at five. Asks for Sonia and is told that the child has been kept in for being a bit too high-spirited but has been released with a caution at ten past four because of the fog. Mother walks streets —’

‘— She felt something terrible had happened,’ said Asta, with tears in her bloodshot bull-eyes, ‘she felt it in her heart.’

‘Quite so, quite so. Everybody always does, or at least they say they do after the fact. Mother walks streets shouting Sonia, Sonia, Sonia, and gets home three-quarters of an hour later. Still no Sonia. Waits till six. Very properly rings local police station. No news. At half-past seven she rings again. Enquiries have been made at local hospitals. Still no news of Sonia. At last body of little girl is found in the coal cellar of empty house (condemned property) in John Cornelius Street. An Offence had been committed and the child strangled. Medical evidence says death occurred some time during that foggy afternoon. Nobody saw anybody or anything. No witnesses could possibly be reliable, in any case, because the whole town was stone blind. … Well?’

Asta Thundersley gritted her big teeth and, after a long pause during which she pinched her cheeks, twisted her ears and stood on one leg like a dropsical stork, while Detective-Inspector Turpin watched her out of the corners of his eyes with a little expectant smile, she said: ‘Arrest every known pervert in London.’

‘You’d have your work cut out,’ said Turpin.

‘What the hell are you paid for? To hang around grinning like a Cheshire cat and wasting the public money in saloon bars?’

‘All right, Miss Thundersley, I beg your pardon. You’re the boss now. You’re going to arrest every known pervert. What do you mean by Pervert?’

‘People who go in for that sort of thing, of course,’ said Asta, angry because she felt that she was not on solid ground.

‘You mean,’ said Turpin, with an irritating smile, ‘arrest everyone whom you know to be a child-murderer, is that it?’

‘I mean everyone who might be a child-murderer,’ said Asta Thundersley, breathing hard.

‘On what charge would you arrest them, Miss?’

‘For questioning.’

‘Ah, Miss Thundersley, I see you’re one of these Hitlerites.’

‘Do you want me to knock your silly head off?’ asked Asta Thundersley, in such a tone that the detective-inspector realized that she might at any moment try to do so.

He said hastily: ‘You can’t just arrest people because they might have done this or that. You ask them to call and see you, or ask permission to call on them and have a few words with them. … But all right. Have it your way. You’re the boss now, remember.’

‘Well,’ said Asta, a little out of countenance, ‘interview (if you like that word better) people who have tendencies that way.’

‘You wouldn’t find enough policemen in the world to do it, would you?’ asked Turpin.

‘What do you mean by that, Turpentine, or whatever you call yourself?’

‘Well, Miss Thundersley, I come back to what I said before. Anyone, absolutely anyone, could be the culprit. Take these queer people whose idea of fun is to give their girl friends a good hiding. Where are they?’

Asta Thundersley said: ‘All over the place, I believe.’

‘Well, I put it to you, since you’re the boss now; anyone who has fun that way might be the man we’re looking for. But how are you to find out? I’m going to be crude: sometimes this sort of nonsense with dog-whips, or whatever it might be, is something between husband and wife, as it might be. Your Queer fellow has his fun, if you can call it fun, with the connivance and the assistance of what a normal person would call the “victim”. The willing victim.’

‘Well, Turpentine?’

‘Turpin. The name is Turpin. You can put it this way. Say, for the sake of example, I am a timid sort of man. I am as quiet as a mouse. This has nothing to do with present company, but — just for the sake of example — I am as quiet as a mouse and you (you realize, of course, that I am only talking for the sake of talking), you are one of those soft little women, one of those little fluffy-ducks who wants to do nothing but please someone.