8. Recruiting a Daughter

THE SANDS OF TIME Part 8

“I must be obsessed with the old sadist,” muttered Desmond to himself, “if he hadn’t been such a b*****d when I was a child I’d probably have forgotten him by now. As it is, I still can’t wait to see him fall, and me in my seventies!”

He drove slowly through Oceaneye to where his daughter Lucy lived. He hadn’t seen her as often as he should but they’d always got on like fathers and daughters should, she following in his footsteps indecently closely.

It being a Friday and the end of a tough week, Lucy Boniface was ready to leave for an evening with fellow officers at The Truncheon and Cuffs, the local pub opposite the police station in central Oceaneye, when her father unexpectedly appeared at her door and walked in without so much as knocking.

“What are you doing here dad?” she asked.

Desmond looked uncomfortable, which was rare enough in itself, and it went close to troubling her.

“I wanted your advice, Lucy,” he said, “about an old case. From before your time, but still on the books, or should be.”

“I thought you were an encyclopedia of every case since Noah was arrested for dropping Mickie Mouse in the Mediterranean and drowning him,” she said, teasingly. He grinned back.

“That was a hard case to crack until I discovered that the bloke called Noah never actually existed,” Desmond told her with a grin.

“So what’s got you wound up this time?” asked his daughter, a Detective Inspector herself, and the current mainstay of the Oceaneye detection team.

“A history teacher I had at school,” he said slowly, “a b*****d he was, and that’s the truth.”

“When you were a kid? he’ll have passed beyond this life and into the darkness of eternity by now, surely?” she asked, making a play of touching up her lipstick so that he would know she was getting ready to go out. He did notice. “The Truncheon, is it?” he asked.

“Could be,” she replied, cautiously. She might be forty two and divorced, but the last thing she wanted was her father attaching himself to her night out. Yes, he was respected by one and all and his clear-up rate had been second to none, but he was yesterday and they were today.

“He’s still alive and kicking and wetting himself,” he told her. “And before he shuffles off this mortal coil I want to do him for a couple of murders. They were all before your time, lovey, so you can’t be expected to know anything about them, but the archives might…”

“And you want me to dig around in the basement?”

“Or get some plod to.”

“Constable Creasey won’t like that! If anyone’s to poke around in his carefully arranged folders it’s got to be him. Anyone else would spoil his many systems without even understanding them, and end up getting nowhere.”

“Then maybe… his name is Gavin Pottle and he’s in his nineties. Way back he got wed to a pretty young woman who vanished off the face of this Earth a couple of years after they exchanged rings. Seems he wanted to be a family man but she’d had a hysterectomy without telling him.”

“That’s a bit mean.”

“Anyway, she went missing and that was that. The damned second world war wasn’t that long over and I guess women who vanished off the face of the world weren’t easily chased up. Anyway, she never turned up, as far as I can tell and I’m curious. Did he do her in? It was the sort of thing he’d do. I’m sure it was him who battered the vicar to death around the same time, but it was put down as an accident waiting to happen with a heavy bronze statuette placed where it would clobber anyone within range if a heavy lorry trundled past and shook the building.. I seem to recall that it was a case of someone saying that could have happened without checking if there were any appropriately heavy lorries in the area that night.”

“You don’t like that bloke do you, dad? Was he a monster? At school, I mean?”

“A sadist and a monster and a bully all rolled into one. He got the sack after too many complaints were made about him, including from your granddad, my own respected father. He ended up being given a choice: get out voluntarily or go to court, and one of the judges so happened to have a boy in one of the classes he taught. So after being turned down just about everywhere he ended up becoming the corporation gardener round here, and the spooky thing is dad got transferred this way too not long after I left school, and we’re neighbours, sort of.”

“And you want him being done for two murders?”

“Not the vicar, though I’m sure he did it. But. I had him exhumed before I retired so that we could take a fresh look at the body and he was certainly clobbered mighty hard with something heavy, but there’s no way of saying whether Mr Pottle wielded the weapon, or gravity with the assistance of a lorry shaking the church to its foundations as it trundled past was the culprit. And as for his wife, I don’t actually know that she’s dead, though I suppose it’s a fair chance that old age has claimed her if he didn’t do her in before you, my darling daughter, were born. But she vanished way back in the bad old days and I’d like to know what happened.”

“Dad, I’m going out with friends and it’s getting late. I’ll see what constable Creasey can find out next week. Promise. Just leave it with me.”

“That’s why a man has daughters, Lucy! You’re a good girl.”

“That’s kind of you, dad, calling me a girl, I mean. I am forty-two, you know!”

“Okay, old lady! Anyway, I know a hint when I see one, so I’ll leave you in peace. There’s a quiet little hostelry down the coast near Quigstone Beach and I reckon my quarry likes a pint or two in there on Friday nights. I might have a chat with him, try oiling his works with an extra drop of the hard stuff.”

“Well, go easy if you’re driving, dad, and I’ll be in touch.”

“Good girl. I’ll be off then. Do you need a lift to the Truncheon?”

“No thanks, dad. It’s only a few minutes walk and I’m meeting Jeanie on the way.”

Desmond kissed his daughter lightly on the cheek and made his way out of her house, leaving her in peace. Or a kind of peace. If her dad was going to play the detective with a geriatric murderer she hoped he’d be careful. A man in his nineties might well know that he hasn’t got much to lose, and if it’s true and he did get away with two murders, risk a third.

It was only a few miles down the coast from Oceaneye to Quigstone beach, and even though his car was elderly Desmond made the trip in only a few minutes. The road was quiet with very little traffic to disturb his thoughts. He knew Lucy would do her best to help her father in his determined search even though there was little or no evidence that anything wrong had taken place way back when the woman had disappeared

The quiet local pub, The Plaice and Chips, was set back from a tiny promontory on which a Victorian entrepreneur had built half a dozen cottages, and Desmond lived in one of them. Gavin Pottle lived on an isolated cul de sac a hundred or so yards further up the coast, well within reach of The Plaice and Chips even for a ninety year-old man on his feet as long as the weather didn’t discourage him, which it might as rain often gusted in vicious eddies from the sea.

It was warm and dry this time, though, as he made his way into the pub.

Mr Pottle was in the lounge bar sitting in what Desmond had come to look on as the Pottle corner because on the few times he’d seen him in the place that was where he was seated, and he had a fresh pint of beer in front of him. But what particularly intrigued the policeman in him was the man who was sitting opposite him, and talking to him.

It was a clergyman if his collar was anything to judge from, and e looked as if he might be even older than Mr Pottle himself.

When Gavin noticed him he scowled. There was, Desmond knew, no love between him and the old bully, nor could there ever be. He still had painful memories of the treatment that had been meted out to him and other boys, usually for little or no reason. He shuddered when he remembered that a favourite offence punished by strokes of the cane was simply wearing your school cap at a jaunty angle. But he wasn’t going to let memories like that determine whatever action he took. If the man had killed his wife, then that was reason enough to put him behind bars. And it needed sorting out while the old bully was still alive.

But who was the clergyman?

© Peter Rogerson, 14.03.22

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