8. Superintendent Knott

THE ACCUSED Part 8

“What is it, Doctor?” asked Superintended Knott when the pathologist Doctor Greaves knocked his door and entered without waiting for the stentorian come in which was the superintendent’s usual reaction to a knocked door.

“It’s the Detective Inspector Baur case,” replied the doctor, “it won’t stand up in court, and that’s a fact. My evidence will be enough to see to that. I refuse to twist what I see to satisfy your own prejudices.”

“It must!” snapped Knott, “she’s as duplicitous as Hell and I want her behind bars until the sun forgets to shine.”

“And evidence?” asked Dr Greaves.

“There’s plenty there. You’ve only got to sift through it and find the stuff that tells the story.”

“But, sir, what story? The one you want to tell the world or the events as they really happened? You can’t have both.”

“What do you mean, man? Evidence is evidence and that’s what I want. To keep the damned Baur woman safely locked away where she can’t parade her spray-tanned legs in this building ever again.”

“You have a slight prejudice there, Superintendent, it seems, and she doesn’t need to spray tan those legs of her. They’re natural and quite charming.”

“Are you accusing me of bias, Doctor? Of all the offensive cheek!”

“Does the name Akbar Hussein mean anything to you, sir?”

The superintendent’s jaw dropped until it looked as if it might detach itself completely.

“What are you asking?” he stammered.

“Well, superintendent, I had a visit from a local bank manager, a Mr Akbar Hussein, who has been following the case with great interest ever since it first hit the papers. It seems he knows you quite well, sir, of old…”

The Superintendent visibly slumped at his desk.

Akbar Hussein was a name that he hadn’t heard in a very long time, and his mind flashed back to when the world had been a brighter place, to when he himself had been thirteen or fourteen and he had a best friend called Akbar Hussein.

For a summer or two they had been inseparable, both of them being interested in similar things and wiling their days in the pleasantly trivial ways that teenage boys can. In particular, cricket. The two of them could spend many a pleasant hour with a few other local children knocking a red ball around the local park, and at school they both made the cricket team. He had been able to handle the bat and Akbar was a wizard with the ball. There had never been one like him, of that the young Knott had been certain, and he almost felt a love for him.

Until, that is, there came the big and irreparable fracture in their friendship. He winced as he sat there at his desk as an image of Akbar flashed in front of his inner eye, the angular, beautiful figure, the focused eyes, the intensity of a mouth and its teeth gleaming as he approached him, running like the devil, ball in hand.

Akbar could do things with that ball. It was as if there was some sort of magical conduit between him and the leather that could make it deviate at the twinkling of an eye.

The pain, when it struck him hard in his groin was dreadful, it seemed as though in that split second his lights all flickered and almost went out for good.

“Not wearing a box, Knott?” sneered a lad in jeans and a dirty tee-shirt.

He wasn’t, because he didn’t have one. A box might well have saved him from that pain, but he’d been negligent and not equipped himself with the right safety equipment, and there he was writhing on the ground in the most dreadful agony a boy could feel. In that moment a friendship was broken for good. The ball, delivered at a tremendous speed, had seen to that.

The Superintendent glowered at Doctor Knott.

“He was a snotty cheat,” he spat out. “Thought he could wing me, thought he could get the better of me!”

“From what he says you were in a great deal of trouble for some time,” almost grinned the pathologist, who had no great fondness for the Superintendent, “he said it might even have turned you…”

“Turned me? What do you mean, turned me?”

“Well, there was the window cleaner when you were taking the first steps in your career,” reminded the doctor.

Superintendent Knott didn’t want to be reminded of that. It was an embarrassment, one that was part of his nature but that he detested in himself. His fascination for lithe young men, his almost total mistrust of the females of the species, had combined to threaten his career before it was properly under way. So he’d married a sharp-tongued b***h in the hope it would cure him.

“I see you remember the odd snippet,” smiled Dr Greaves, enjoying the position he’d quite deliberately put the policeman in. “Akbar told me what you said to him at the time of that rather unpleasant injury.”

“I don’t recall saying anything!” came the heated reply.

“He said, and he told me it’s as close a quote as the intervening years have left undimmed, that you’d see to him one day, and all the snotty foreigners who think they can rule the roost in our country…”

“It must have been the way I felt,” sighed Knott, “after all, when he hit me with that ball, I can feel the pain in my head as if was real even today when I think of it…”

“And it was the guiding light you’ve always followed since then. Do I have to spell it out, Knott, or do you realise what’s going on? You had a lovely woman in the office next door and you are consumed by the need to get rid of her for good. Now, I warn you, prejudice like that can’t be allowed to persist. I mean, a boyhood bit of carelessness with a cricket bat!”

“It was the ball that hit me!”

“Because the bat didn’t defend you like it should have done, and that was down to you. And you’ve allowed yourself, ever since then, to wage a private war on anyone with even a slightly tanned skin!What started as a close and typical friendship between two boys ended up as a piece of racial hatred you’ve never come to terms with! And don’t forget your window cleaner a few years later. Stalking, wasn’t it?”

“That’s enough of that!”

“Well, enough or not, you’ve got to think about it. You’ve got to decide whether you really want to destroy the career of a woman who is your better when it comes to the detection of crime. You want to get your head in order…”

“And you know me well enough to suggest such rot?” growled Knott.

“Well, there are channels, sir, the proper routes to solve our little quandaries. Take note, sir, or you might find yourself floating down one of them.”

© Peter Rogerson, 21.04.21