He Died with His Eyes Open (3 page)

'I wonder how he got himself so well hated,' I said.

'Don't ask me things like that,' said the pathologist, 'I'm only quite young still and don't have much insight into people's horrible motives. I hope I never do. Anyway, it's not my job,' he added. 'I only establish time and cause of death, and I'm not a copper, I just work for them.' We were in the morgue, and he dropped a clutch of bloody instruments into a sterilizing unit. He glanced at Staniland's blue face as his assistant slid him back into the fridge.

'Maybe he knew too much, sort of overspecialized in something.'

'And then talked in his sleep,' said the assistant, banging the fridge shut.

'Find a builder,' said the pathologist with a snigger. 'Find a hammer, why don't you? I'll match it up to the hair and the blood group.'

He made me rather angry. 'Imagine one day having a girl-friend too many, doctor,' I said, 'and being hammered to death by a jealous lover. Or not a girl-friend. A boy-friend.'

'Look here, I trust you're not insinuating—'

'And imagine us, the law, mimicking Sherlock Holmes over your remains—me, and that assistant of yours with the wisdom of the ages in his face and the dead fag in his mouth.'

3

I went to sleep in my dreadful little bachelor's flat—a police flat—at Earlsfield after starting to look through Staniland's property. Bowman had sent it over in an old suitcase. I dreamed that far below me, under the walls of a ruined fortress, there was a field faded brown by drought with rocks lying in it. I was abroad somewhere—somewhere that smelled—and sitting on a terrace that I suddenly found was made of rotten canvas. My legs dangled over the edge and my feet were so far from the ground that the soles tingled. On either side of me well-dressed people chatted to each other, unconcerned. Then the whole structure yawed, swayed and fell devastatingly away; I screamed as I fell towards the field with the rocks in it. 'They have to get you in the end,' Staniland remarked calmly as we fell together, 'otherwise there'd be no end to the pointlessness.'

I woke up sweating.

I thought about myself. I'm not a bachelor, I'm divorced. On the face of it, that doesn't mean much in the police nowadays; if it did, they'd never be able to fill the ranks.

It doesn't help your career, though. The people upstairs have never been divorced, whatever they may have done on the side (things that come out, to the public amazement, from time to time).

Having accepted yet again that I would always be a sergeant, I stared upwards into the dark trying to focus on Staniland, trying to imagine him walking, upright and alive, without his injuries. I went on trying to picture him like this until I wished morning would come.

I switched the light on at five and got out one of the tapes from Staniland's collection and put it on my cassette player.

People stroll about in Battersea Park among the dogs' turds as if they had all time before them. I hope they really believe it—they might as well. They go round and round the park, then they turn about and go back to the flats which border it. There they sit and worry about their problems and wait for the pubs to open. In spite of their clothes, a lot of them are sitting tenants and on social security. If you tell them that you're a writer, they tell you that they are writers too, though they haven't an ounce of talent in them, only resentment and nastiness. They come on very liberal: this is false. The moment you have anything interesting going in your room—a discussion, a party, a screw—they start banging on your floor with a broom handle like a jealous mother-in-law in a hopeless, elderly way. These are your 'neighbours'. Next evening you see them in the bar of the Princess Caroline wearing secondhand snappy coats, sporting gold buttons with anchors on them and peaked caps at an angle, Leninstyle. They look ready to denounce anybody; they are obsessed with their middle-class status right down to the last assumption, down to the mongrel which they strain against their feet in their balding suede bootees just as if these snappish animals had a pedigree. When I have had a few drinks these people turn into predatory birds, hornets and wasps. If I criticize them, they tell me I have no pity. If I do not, they have none for me.

Under its strictly tended foliage, the keepers of Battersea Park shut the gates at ten-thirty at night, reminding you that you aren't in the country now, while not three streets behind the Rastafarians roam and howl. Shut out of the pubs down there by unwritten law they rule the streets— their prey the Asians, those whites who are too defenceless to retaliate and, in general, intelligent-looking and therefore possibly rich people. The only things the jobless blacks can call their own are the paving stones. Battersea is representative of a hopeless national situation, and only a succession of typical British governments could ever have got us out into it. I loathe Battersea. I just want to go mad.

I turned the tape over, but the other side was blank.

4

Morning came. It shone through my uncurtained bedroom window, but I still listened. I came to a grim account that began:

France. The moment I got back to Duéjouls after the others had left, the first thing I did was burn all my daughter's clothes—all her books and toys that had been left behind. As I couldn't bear to look at them I took everything up behind the house into the courtyard and made a huge fire of them. It was August, and the heat was so great that I was afraid everything would catch fire—the house, the whole village, the sky. I watched her books burn up:
Ant and Bee, A Busy, Busy Day, Mister Clumsy
and
Mister Clever
. Her drawings of houses and cats and snails soaring over her impression of the house on the wind wrinkled and flared; the flames gusted through them. The evening breeze from the
causses
flailed and tossed her works lightly up to heaven, as lightly as if they had never been. I felt horribly faint inside as I stoked the fire—as if I had been transformed by a fever that left only my twisted body behind, listless and hideous. I knew only that it had to be done as I burned her clothes and shoes; it was the cost of my failure as a father and a man. Everything would have to be explained and paid for—but not tonight, not now.

Wine now: I drank the cold wine from the bottle while the fire burned, destroying our past for us, my daughter's and mine. When the fire looked like dying of exhaustion under its ash I threw some eau-de-vie on it and raked the slabs of half-burned paper and material with a hoe they call a
harpe
round here to give the fire more air. When everything was burned I knew I had done right as I reeled away. I knew Charlotte could never, and would never, come back. Life had never permitted her any fairy-tales, not with me as her parent: and it never would. I cried with fury and despair and loneliness as with a last gesture I threw on her old gumboots and school satchel, and burned her exercise books with their drawings of frogs and flowers, and the scraps of poems she had copied out with Madame Castan:
'Jamais, jamais, tu ne la rattraperas!'

I have to explain what the agony of her loss means—she was my heart, my soul, my other self. But I could never possibly have told her so, and so I lost her. Once I knew I was going to lose her, I suddenly preferred to lose her at once, not wait. I rushed onto the loss, I sent everybody away, then went away myself. Ah, existence is like water, it is everywhere and yet it flows away. They say I have Polish blood on my mother's side. When I came back, as I had to, I burned everything that had belonged to her. Are the English inhuman? While I was in England my brother said I shouldn't take everything so seriously. But if you don't take love seriously, what do you take seriously? Belongings? Money? Property?

I put the fire out in the evening. I wonder how much of this I can really stand?

After a pause on the tape Staniland answered himself:

Only so much, of course. I'll find out when the time comes.

He had found out all right. I put Staniland's tape down on the floor. I wondered how much Bowman, or the two PCs, or the pathologist, or anyone else, would have understood of them.

I wondered how much I really understood.

5

Bowman had given me the wrong address for Staniland. It wasn't the Battersea address on the national insurance card they had found on him, but the one on the letter from a bank saying they'd be really very glad if he'd drop in pretty well at once and see them about his overdraft. It was dated only a fortnight before his death, and the address it was sent to was in Lewisham, the clock-tower end of it. I had found the letter mixed in with his papers.

I started to think about everything I knew of Staniland so far, beginning with his being smashed to pieces. He was fifty-one. He was balding. When they washed the blood off him, he had nice hands (you could see from the one he still had the shape of ) and had perhaps been attractive to women. Too attractive? But he didn't read like a love-'em-and-leave-'em specialist. The fingers on that hand—his right—were stained with nicotine. He was a drinker, too—you could tell that from his nose, and from his problems, as shown up in what he had recorded. Not an alcoholic, though; his handwriting was too precise, the letters as a rule well-formed for a man who had written quickly, and well-spaced between the lines, the lower loops never entangling themselves with the upper loops of the line below. It was an educated, reflective, intelligent hand that didn't go with the cheap suit he was found in.

What the hell had the man been doing?

Bowman hadn't found any money on him. He was on welfare. That didn't mean he was broke, though; plenty of people these days fiddled the rules; they had to, to survive. Besides, there was the letter from the bank—he must surely have had money in it once, even if he only owed it when he died.

I kept shutting my eyes till it was late enough on in the morning for me to go out and get information, trying to visualize Staniland and how he had lived. A writing man. A self-confessed failure, tortured by the loss of his daughter. A man who had lived abroad, probably for a long time (I should have to listen to all his tapes to verify that, but there were so many of them that it would take time), an educated man.

I rang Bowman and got him at home just as he was leaving for the Factory.

'Staniland,' I said.

'Well?'

'Why did you give me that address in Battersea when he lived in Lewisham?'

'I didn't know I had.'

'Surely you knew the address where your blokes had picked up his gear from,' I said. 'His papers and tapes and so on.'

'Why? Is it interesting?'

'You're a cold-hearted bastard,' I said. 'What he taped you could listen to for a thousand years and have no pity for him.'

'Cut out the Shakespeare,' he said. 'I've got a conference at ten for a million-pound breaking-and-entering. Anyway, did I play any of them? Did I have time? You're joking.'

'I'll make you wish you never had,' I said, 'if I don't get better cooperation from you than this.'

'Are you threatening me?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Less of the casual cut and thrust, slap and tickle— more dedication to fact, like we learned in police college, week two.'

'Okay, okay. Is that it?'

'It is this time. But we're supposed to be one solid force.

'That's why it's called a force,' I said. 'And the next time you just throw any old unverified blag off on me over a case I'm handling, you might just have a stumble on your next flight to the top.'

He said incredulously: 'Are you telling me? Me? A chief inspector?'

'Yes, I'm telling you,' I said. 'Murder outranks rank, so watch your step.'

'Why don't you watch your blood pressure, Sergeant?' he said, and put the phone down.

I looked at the dead receiver for a while. Before going out, I thought some more. It wasn't a routine killing—not a skinhead rolling and mugging job. Hatred—evil that Staniland had evoked in someone—had caused those deliberate, frightful injuries. Earlier in the morning I had heard on one of Staniland's tapes:

You can go on for a long time explaining what life means to people, but do you still not understand that you're never going to get out of this alive? The question is, though, how are you going to die? Everyone has to face that. The problem is, how to do it consciously, deliberately, plan it up to the last moment, and record everything. The best thing would be if I could record what happened at the last moment, and after that moment. But someone else will have to fill that gap—if its ever filled.

I played that part again. For a moment I wondered if he meant suicide. But however Staniland had met his death, it certainly hadn't been that way. Besides, I didn't think that that was what the passage meant. I reviewed what little I knew; the salient point was that he hadn't been killed where he was found. He couldn't have walked. It always came back to murder. As if by telepathy, the pathologist rang. 'I've done the autopsy.'

'Well?'

'His blood group is O negative... Look, what I really want to say is that he was even worse hurt than we thought when he came in. Both legs were broken, not just one—a fracture of the left kneecap, he couldn't have walked on it, as well as the multiple fracture of the right tibia. There's bruising to the medulla too, something I missed at first. Dislocation of the left shoulder, third and fourth ribs cracked on the same side.'

'Christ, what did they do?' I said. 'Drop him from a building? An aircraft?'

'No, no,' said the pathologist, 'it was a beating all right. I'd say you were still looking for that hammer, though the ribs and the kneecap might have been a kicking. Someone had a go with a knife, too; there's a long gash up his right arm that would have had to be stitched. So, hammer, knife and the boot—there would have had to be at least two of them, you can bank on that.' He stopped for breath.

'Anything else?' I said.

The man coughed. 'Well, lab tests show that he didn't die very quickly.'

'I'm listening.'

'They started with the fractures at the extremities, the fingers and hand, then the legs. Then he was hit in the right eye—it was nearly closed, you remember—there was extensive bruising. Then there was the knife wound. It looks to me as if it was thrown, the knife. Probably a flick-knife or kitchen— heavy, at any rate—say a twelve-centimetre blade. They, er, rather worked him over.'