Last Detective by Leslie Thomas Page A

with some difficulty that Davies managed to entice Mod to leave and to walk with him to the canal bank.
    â€˜If I am to be your Dr Watson, I wish you could arrange for our investigations to be outside drinking hours,’ complained Mod. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, I can’t see how any clues to this conundrum—there, I said it too, beered as I am—are going to be lying around by the canal twenty-five years after the event.’
    A man loitering in a shop doorway opposite saw them leave the bar and, after allowing them fifty yards’ clearance, walked in the shadows behind. He watched them make for the entrance to the alley between the pawnbroker’s and the massage parlour, then hurried down a service road alongside some neighbouring shops and climbed a fence to reach the canal bank. He ran through the towpath mud, passed a man fishing in the dead of night, and turned up the alley from the canal end. Davies and Mod were wandering towards him.
    â€˜It’s not clues, it’s geography I want to be sure about,’ Davies was saying patiently. ‘On her way home she might have cycled down this cut and gone along the towpath to the road bridge. I just want to cover the ground, that’s all.’
    The man who had followed them now approached from the foot of the alley. They looked up from their talk and saw him come, coat-collared, towards them. Davies felt an instinctive touch of nervousness as the silhouette came nearer, as though his new role had given a sharper edge. They had almost to touch to pass each other and, as people do in such awkward circumstances they muttered almost into each other’s faces as they passed.
    â€˜Good-night,’ said Davies.
    â€˜Nighty-night,’ added Mod.
    â€˜Night,’ responded the man, a short blast of beer emitting with the word. Davies saw nothing more of him than a pale triangle of face jutting from the collar and pinpoint eyes squinting through rudimentary spectacles. The man had gone to the upper end of the alley before Davies realized that there were no lenses in those glasses.
    The alley performed a mile curve and beyond the angle the limp lamplit water of the canal came into their view. The damp, rotten smell was at once heavier. They stood and took in the confined scene. If the girl had gone that way she would have had that same view in the same light as she rode carefully on her bicycle. The helmeted lamp had hovered above the bridge for many years. It was as if it had lost something in the water and was taking a long time to find it.
    Davies and Mod were contemplating the chill view, hearing the bored glugging of the water against its old banks when, dramatically, a figure ascended from behind the elevated hedge on their right. They jumped like a pair of ponies. The figure squeaked nervously. ‘Oh…oh…ever so sorry, mates…’ he said eventually. He stood upright against the hedge, five feet above them because of the variant in the ground levels. Davies and Mod regarded him as they would have regarded the appearance of Satan. Davies contained his voice. ‘Don’t worry,’ he laughed hollowly. ‘Didn’t see you there, that’s all. Made us jump.’
    â€˜No, you wouldn’t, not from down there,’ acknowledged the man. ‘Completely hidden from down there I am, I bet.’ He performed a brief demonstration crouching behind the hedge and calling to them. ‘There, can you see me now?’
    â€˜No, not a thing. Can’t see you at all,’ obliged Davies.
    â€˜What you doing anyway?’ inquired Mod, more to the point.
    â€˜The allotment,’ said the man, rising and nodding over his shoulder into the vacant darkness. ‘Only chance I’ve got of getting down here. By the time I get home from work and that. I’m just getting a few veg.’
    â€˜Good job you know where everything is,’ observed Davies.
    â€˜All in nice straight