Ancestral Vices (33 page)

‘It was gigantic,’ she told Inspector Garnet, ‘I wouldn’t have believed it possible to have such a big one. I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t had the presence of mind to slam the door in his face.’

‘And you say he was wearing a mask?’ said the Inspector, preferring not to speculate on the probable consequences of an enormous you-know-what being inserted into the person of even a divorced dwarf.

‘Yes, a horrible black shiny thing, but it was the you-know . . .’

‘Quite so. You were very sensible to slam the door and bolt it. Very sensible indeed. Now have you any recollection of seeing this knife?’

He produced a large carving knife which had been found in the garden. Mrs Fossen shook her head.

‘Then we won’t keep you any longer. Two constables will drive you home and we’ll keep a guard on your house until this maniac is apprehended.’

That night Emmelia had no trouble getting to sleep. She had achieved her object without having to resort to physical force and the carving knife must be giving the police something to think about.

In this she was right. Next morning Inspector Garnet held a briefing session.

‘We’ve established three important facts about the man we’re looking for. Forensic have identified the cats that have slept on the blanket used in Miss Ottram’s case. Siamese, Burmese, a lot of tabbies and at least one Persian. Next the knife. It’s old and well-worn and has
traces of dandelion root on it. Finally there are these handcuffs. Obviously they’re handmade and purpose-built by a craftsman in metalwork. Now if any of you can come up with information that will lead us to a cat-fancier and health-food addict who dabbles in ironwork in his spare time, we should be able to wrap this case up.’

‘I suppose it’s too much to ask if there were any fingerprints?’ said the Sergeant.

‘Only smudges. Anyway he’d have to be an idiot to go out on a job without gloves in these enlightened days.’

‘Only a raving lunatic would go around trying to rape dwarves,’ said the Sergeant, ‘especially with a penis the size of a small tree-trunk the way that Mrs Fossen described it.’

Inspector Garnet looked at him pityingly. ‘I shouldn’t take too much notice of what she says. I mean anyone her stature is going to find a normal penis enormous. It’s all a question of relativity and perspective. If you were knee-high to a dachshund you’d think a pencil was a whopper.’

For several days the police visited local catteries, took the names of customers of two health-food shops and interviewed them, and grilled the employees of several wrought-iron works. Their investigations led them nowhere and forced Emmelia to act with the ferocious desperation she had hoped to avoid.

Her victim this time was a Miss Consuelo Smith,
whose reply to Frederick’s advert suggested she was a dwarf of easy virtue. It had not mentioned that she was also a Black Belt dwarf. It was left to Emmelia to discover this disconcerting fact when, having phoned Miss Smith and pretended to be the Gentleman of Restricted Growth of the agony column, they met at a rendezvous outside the Memorial Hall in Lower Busby. As the secondhand Ford drew alongside and Emmelia opened the door Miss Smith hopped nimbly into the seat before realizing she had evidently entered the wrong car.

‘Here, where do you think you’re going?’ she shouted as Emmelia accelerated. ‘You’re not a fucking dwarf. You’re a ruddy norm.’

‘Yes, dear,’ said Emmelia hoarsely, finding some difficulty in accepting the term, ‘but I’m very fond of little people.’

‘Well, I’m buggered if I’m going to have a colossus fondling me, so stop the car,’ screamed Miss Consuelo. Emmelia groped for her knife.

‘You’ll do what I say or I’ll stick you like I did the other one,’ she said and was promptly proved wrong. With one hand Miss Consuelo chopped the knife onto the car floor and with the other delivered a rabbit punch to Emmelia’s Adam’s apple which left her speechless and gasping for breath. As she struggled to control the car Miss Consuelo employed more drastic tactics and tried to get her hands on her abductor’s scrotum. Instead she hit the dildo. Unlike Mrs Fossen, Consuelo was not awed by its size. On the contrary she considered it a
distinct advantage and with all the experience of a truly demi-mondaine hurled herself at it and sank her teeth into the thing. To her consternation Emmelia did not scream in agony but pulled the car into the side of the road.

‘All right, you can get out now,’ she said, finally finding her voice, but Consuelo hung on with a tenacity that sprang from a new fear. A man who could speak with even comparative calm while having his glans penis bitten to the quick was either a masochist to end all masochists or a creature of such phenomenal self-control that she was taking no chances. For a fraction of a second she opened her mouth and then bit again even harder. But Emmelia had had enough. Leaning over, she opened the side door and hurled Consuelo out into the ditch, slammed the door shut and drove off.

Consuelo sat in the ditch and stared after the retreating tail lights before realizing that she still had something in her mouth. With a natural revulsion she spat it out and gave vent to her feelings.

Ten minutes later, in a state of hysterical horror at what she had done, she stumbled across the threshold of the policeman’s house at Lower Busby and presently was washing her mouth out with neat disinfectant while trying at intervals to explain what had happened.

‘You mean to say you bit the top of the bastard’s prick off and he didn’t even squeak?’ said the Constable and promptly developed what amounted to lockjaw of the thighs.

‘What do you think I keep telling you?’ mumbled Consuelo.

‘But what was it doing there in the first place. You say this man picked you up and tried to assault you—’

‘I didn’t give the sod a chance,’ spluttered Consuelo. ‘I chopped him one across the gizzard and then because he had this erection I bit the beastly thing and the top bit was still there when I fought my way out of the car.’

‘Still where?’

‘Between my teeth, stupid.’ Consuelo washed her mouth out again. ‘I spat it out and ran here.’

The policeman blanched and crossed his legs still tighter. ‘Well, all I can say is that there’s some poor bugger out there who must be wishing to hell he hadn’t met up with you. Must be bleeding to death by now. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

Consuelo Smith bridled. ‘I like that,’ she said bitterly. ‘Talk about a man’s fucking world and a norm’s at that. I bet if I’d been raped and murdered you wouldn’t feel so sorry for me. But just because I bit—’

‘All right, all right. I agree. It’s just that . . .’

‘It happened to be a male norm,’ continued Consuelo, only to be confounded later when Inspector Garnet arrived with a search party and discovered the tip of the dildo.

‘Fuck me,’ he said angrily staring down at the thing. ‘Just when it seemed certain the swine couldn’t strike
again and all we’d got to do was to go round the hospitals and pick up the first bloke without the end of his prick, what do we find? An artificial one. And what does that tell us?’

‘That the bastard knew his onions when dealing with that human rat-trap,’ said the Constable, who was still having difficulty walking properly.

‘Balls,’ said the Inspector, adding to the Constable’s trauma. ‘It doesn’t need a shrink to tell us that our man is impotent and so sexually inadequate he can’t cope with a proper woman.’

‘I wouldn’t put it that way in front of Consuelo. She doesn’t take kindly to—’

It was the Inspector’s turn to squirm. ‘Kindly?’ he shouted. ‘Having seen what she can do to a cross between a radial tyre and a penis I wouldn’t dream of putting my private parts anywhere near the bitch.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I mean about her not being a proper woman. She’s a Dwarf Libber. She talks about male norms.’

‘She can talk about them till she’s blue in the face but what she’s done to this thing’s not normal, not by a long chalk.’

They went back to the station and confronted Consuelo with the new evidence.

‘You needn’t worry, Miss Smith,’ said the Inspector, ‘you can’t possibly have caught anything . . .’

But Consuelo wasn’t listening. Her attention was fixed
on the plastic glans penis. ‘I knew there was something strange,’ she said. ‘No wonder it didn’t scream blue murder.’

‘“It” being the operative word, said the Inspector. ‘We’re evidently dealing with a sexual psychopath who can’t get it up and—’

‘Rubbish,’ interrupted Consuelo, ‘you’re dealing with a woman.’ Inspector Garnet smiled sympathetically. ‘Of course we are, Miss Smith. And a woman of considerable spirit too, if I may say so.’

‘Not me, dummy. The person who attacked me was a woman. I should have known that. When she first spoke it was with a deep voice but at the end it was pitched several octaves higher.’

‘That’s understandable after what you’d . . .’

‘Bright-eyes,’ said Consuelo contemptuously, ‘this is a false one, remember? Which is why she didn’t scream.’

The Inspector sank despondently into a chair. ‘You’re quite certain it was a woman.’

‘Absolutely. And what’s more she had a la-di-da voice like she was talking down to you.’

‘Yes, well all things considered I daresay she . . .’ began the Inspector before being quelled by the look in her eyes. ‘Right, so now all we’ve got to find is an upper-class lesbian who keeps cats, has lost a carving knife and the top half of a surrogate penis, and is a dab hand at making handcuffs. There can’t be many such women around.’

‘She also drives a Cortina, is five foot five, weighs about 140 pounds and has a sore left wrist.’

‘Thank you very much, Miss Smith. You’ve been extremely helpful, and now a police car will take you home. If we require any further information from you—’

‘Blimey,’ interrupted Consuelo, ‘if this is the way the fuzz works it’s no bleeding wonder there’s so much crime around. Don’t you even want to know how it was I got into that car? You don’t think I go around getting into strange cars in the middle of the night without a bloody good reason, or do you? I may not be half your size but I reckon my head’s got more brains in it than you pack under your helmet.’

‘I don’t wear a helmet,’ said the Inspector huffily, and glanced with something approaching sympathy at the gnawed dildo. ‘Well, why did you?’

‘Because I answered an ad in the
Gazette
for a lady and this afternoon I had a phone call.’

‘For a lady? What sort of lady?’

‘My sort, of course,’ said Consuelo, rummaging in her handbag and extracting the cutting.

The Inspector read it. ‘A lonely middle-aged Gentleman of Restricted Growth seeks . . . Do you usually answer advertisements of this kind?’

‘Oh, practically every day,’ said Consuelo. ‘I mean you see them all the time, don’t you? You can hardly pick up a paper these days without coming across appeals from lonely dwarves appealing for company. Use your loaf.’

‘There’s no need to be rude,’ said the Inspector, ‘we’re here to help you.’

‘Yes, well when I need your help I’ll call the Fire
Brigade,’ said Consuelo gathering her things together and rising slightly, ‘I may be a Person of Restricted Growth, though I prefer to be called a straightforward dwarf, but at least I don’t have the disability of a restricted mentality. I leave that to you lot.’

There was a sigh of relief when she had gone. ‘Anyway, she gave us some useful information,’ said the Inspector. ‘I want a check made on the previous victims to see if they answered that advert in the agony column too.’

‘Agony column just about sums it up,’ said the Sergeant, nudging the dildo tip into a plastic bag.

‘And if we can find a few more desperate female dwarves we can stake out their homes and hopefully catch whatever’s doing this redhanded.’

But the hope was short-lived. Consuelo Smith was already on the phone selling the exclusive rights to her story so successfully to several national newspapers that the headlines ‘
BUSHAMPTON DWARFIST STRIKES AGAIN
’ appeared on the front pages of four national dailies next morning.

By noon Briskerton was awash with reporters imbued with a sense of righteous investigation, and Inspector Garnet had been provoked into denying that Professor Yapp had been wrongly arrested and tried for the murder of Willy Coppett.

‘In that case would you mind telling us what measures
the police are taking to protect other dwarves in your patch?’ asked one reporter who had bribed the police telephonist into revealing that Consuelo Smith was the third dwarf to be attacked in recent days.

‘No comment,’ said the Inspector.

‘Then you don’t agree that there’s any connection between these three latest attacks by the dwarfist and the previous murder of Mr Coppett?’

‘Certainly not,’ said the Inspector, and went on to an exceedingly unpleasant interview with the Chief Constable who shared the reporter’s opinion.

‘But these new attacks have been made by a woman,’ the Inspector said inconsequentially. ‘The forensic experts have come up with corroborating evidence in the work on that blanket. They’ve found traces of face-powder and lipstick on it. And some dyed hair.’

‘And I don’t suppose it’s crossed your so-called mind that the case against Professor Yapp was largely based on the evidence of Mrs Coppett. If you know what’s good for your career you’ll take her in for questioning before we have another confounded murder on our hands.’

Inspector Garnet left in a murderous mood himself. ‘It’s all your fucking fault,’ he shouted at the Sergeant at the Buscott police station, ‘all that gaff about the bitch being half-witted and kind-hearted and devoted to her precious Willy.’

‘She was. I’d swear to that.’

‘Well, for your information she’s so bloody fond of dwarves she butchered the sod and landed us in the
crap by setting Yapp up for us. That’s how half-witted she is.’

‘But what about the body in the boot and the blood all over his shirt?’

‘Which she conveniently left on the clothes line for us to find. And as for putting bodies in the boot of that car, has it occurred to you that if Yapp had murdered her husband he wouldn’t have used his own car as a coffin for a week. He’d never have put the corpse there in the first place. But she would – to set the poor bugger up. So where is she now?’