How the Dead Live (Factory 3) (13 page)

‘You nauseate me,’ he said, ‘I find you nauseating.’

‘The smell a corpse makes is worse than all the smell of us put together,’ I said, ‘and I believe that there’s one around here somewhere in Thornhill not far that’ll make me vomit if not you. Now don’t be arrogant and look at me in your funny way, it’ll get you nowhere. You just tell me what you know about the Mardys during the time you worked for them and realize you’re in deep trouble.’

He began to get afraid. ‘I tell you I just gardened for them.’

‘And that was it? Just planting and digging?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I don’t think that’s right at all, my darling,’ I said, ‘so speak up before I tune you to the song – there was a lot more to it than just that, and I’m going to pitch your strings to the point where you’ll sing me the lot, so get going.’ The old woman was still standing near us, silent and weaving with drink, and I said to Dick: ‘Is your mum strangling your throat? She can go or stay as long as you talk, I don’t care.’

I didn’t; he did though. He turned to her with eyes like a swivelling shotgun and said: ‘Fuck off out of this, Mum, will you.’

She screamed at me: ‘Don’t you go victimizing my boy, do you hear?’

I said: ‘I’ll do what I have to,’ and the boy said: ‘Just go back indoors, Ma, didn’t I say – I can manage.’ I said: ‘Yes, and take your dogs with you.’

‘Why? They bother you?’ she sneered.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they stink, now get them out,’ and at that she turned heavily away towards the house, trudging across the mud of the yard on swollen ankles. She said backwards to her son, the words streaming on her frozen breath: ‘You mind yourself with that cunt, Dick, my son, he’s a copper and he’s got an evil mind,’ and so she slunk off back into the house, dogs and all, and the warped door banged to after her.

‘That’s better,’ I said to Sanders, ‘much better. Better for me definitely, and maybe for you too – if you spill about the Mardys we could perhaps do a deal.’

‘Money?’ he said.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said, ‘what, you? It’s your liberty I’m thinking of, you’ll be lucky to keep it.’

‘Still, a few quid greases the wheels.’

‘You are an idiot first class, you travel free to the nuthouse,’ I said. ‘Didn’t I just tell you? You’ve got a lot to learn.’

He said: ‘If you’ve the money for it, they say you can do that in bars.’

‘Not in your case,’ I said. ‘In your case you won’t learn it in them but you’ll be buried and forgotten behind them, so try and play lucky for once. Now tell me what I want to know and we’ll see what we can do, all right? OK, answer these questions. What was Mrs Mardy doing during the time you worked up at their house? How did she behave? How did she look? What did she wear? Come on. Talk.’

‘I can’t. I didn’t see. I was just there.’

‘You lying bastard,’ I said. ‘Look, I know how thick you are, a man has to be thick with the form you’ve got, but you can still see the difference in the woman who employs you when she’s got a
veil round her face and when she hasn’t, surely, can’t you?’

‘All right,’ he said, ‘all right, let up, will you?’ Now he was really frightened.

‘I don’t see why I should,’ I said. ‘You didn’t.’

‘Yeah she wore a veil,’ he said, ‘but what you said just now is threatening.’

‘I haven’t begun,’ I said. ‘A worm like you, I could have a W in my jacket for you right now, so really sing, it’s the disappearance of a human being we’re talking about, you’re getting the message at long last, so speak, speak, fuck you.’

He knew when he was beat. ‘All right, well, yes,’ he said, ‘while I worked up there, like over a period, you know, I watched her getting weaker, kind of drained, it’s dificult to know how to put it, trundling about in the garden and that, yeah, her face veiled – she’d always go into what they called the rose garden, all overgrown, no roses, no man could keep up, it was all just weeds but you could see where the flowers had been, and she’d turn her veiled head away if I was around and stretch her arms up a moment into the sunlight, it was always afternoon, and then go back into the house. As for the husband, poor old gent, he’d be fumbling somewhere behind her, bending to pick wild flowers, there were no others, and he’d have made a bouquet of them which he’d always give her on the balcony at sunset, there above the front door.’

I said: ‘Had you any idea why she always covered her face?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘nothing to do with me! No, Christ, of course I don’t fucking know!’

‘I hope for your own sweet sake that you’re telling the truth,’ I said, ‘because if you’re not you could find yourself being stood in a concrete corner for a very long time. Your best option now is to tell me the entire truth over what you know about the Mardys. Do it now, Dick, while you’ve still got a chance.’

‘You mob never let up,’ he said.

‘No, never where there’s a death,’ I said. ‘Use a little imagination and try to see what it means to die.’

‘I’d never thought about it,’ he said and I said start before it’s too late, Dick.

‘You folk from London are really murder,’ he sobbed.

‘It’s the filthy business we’re into,’ I said, ‘like it or not – so how did you get the job up at the Mardys?’

‘I was recommended. All right, I’ll talk – have you ever heard of a man here called Walter Baddeley?’

I said: ‘Where do you fit in with him?’

‘I fit in with him where everybody else in Thornhill does, nearly,’ he said. ‘We’re all on sup. ben.’

I said: ‘Was it Baddeley sent you up to work for the Mardys?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, nodding and bowing his thin head. ‘Yeah, it was.’

‘And you didn’t just garden,’ I said. ‘You spied, listened and watched.’

‘This is very tiring,’ he said, ‘all this is.’ His face set obstinately.

‘So is Canterbury,’ I said, ‘specially since it’ll be the third time round for you in there, now choose.’

He laughed in my face. ‘You think you’re so bright and so tough, you think you can do anything with a warrant card. But I reckon you’re just a cunt.’

My voice turned grey on him and in me and I said: ‘You’re a fool to take me for a cunt, you know nothing about me, what I’ve done, what I’ve been, what’s happened to me. But all right, let’s play cunties, now supposing I were to take this’ (removing the rake from the hand of the motionless figure beside us) ’and hit you so hard with it that you had to wear a scarf round your face for the rest of your days, then what?’

‘Oh come on,’ he said, sniggering yet backing off, ‘you’d be in dead trouble if you did that, now you would, wouldn’t you? Hey, man, that’s enough.’

‘You’re so right, it is,’ I said. I was never going to hit him and didn’t need to, for he broke slowly over on his knees in a corner of his own accord, sobbing, covering himself up with his hands. ‘You pitiful man,’ I said, ‘get up, get up.’

He wouldn’t, though, but screamed ‘Hey! Mum!’

‘She won’t save you,’ I said, ‘come on, you little actor, what have you all been doing to Mrs Mardy? Tell me what you know – I don’t need any more of your sweet old country lies.’

Now the old bat leaned out through a cracked window upstairs. ‘Are you all right, my Dick?’ she crooned to him, ‘are you seeing to that nosy copper, my son? That’s right, my dear, I heard him sobbing, you see to him, you give him a right taste of it.’

Then she saw it was all the other way round.

‘You shitbag,’ she shouted down, ‘have you hit my boy?’

‘You bet your fat tits I will if I have to,’ I said.

‘Fuck the Mardys!’ she shouted, ‘and fuck you, my Dick was just a gardener.’

‘A laughing gardener,’ I said, ‘he giggled in the wrong place. He knows what I want to know over this business, and he knows that I know it. As for gardening, he wouldn’t know one weed from another unless he could roll it up and smoke it.’

‘You want him seen to, Dick?’ she screamed. ‘It’s easy done, I’ll get the banger to him now!’ Her shadow staggered back out of the light. Sanders moved to get up, but I pushed him backwards. ‘You’re dead,’ I said to him, ‘but not buried yet. You do exactly as I tell you and you’ll stay healthy, and not a moment longer.’

Old dreadnought was back at her window with a twelve-bore; I watched the barrels switch about in the half-dark, narrowing and shortening on us, the blue steel glinting from the bulb behind her as she tried to find the range. I took hold of Sanders and started dragging him out of the light, saying: ‘She’s going to fire, but let’s hope she’s too pissed. Let’s get into that barn, now come on, sweetheart, move, I want you living so you can speak to a court.’

‘All right,’ he muttered, ‘anything. I’m frightened of my mum when she’s got a gun in her hands.’

The old fool upstairs fused the bulb in the room with a blow from her furious head and there was no more light in the yard, but I could feel the twelve-bore aiming for me and I yelled, pushing Dick behind me: ‘You fire on a police officer, you old bag, and that’s the rest of your life gone rotten.’

‘I don’t fucking care!’ she shrieked, ‘you can both of you go and wank yourselves!’

I got Sanders into the barn doorway and was about to back in too when the first barrel went off. I like playing snooker and it wasn’t the right angle for the shot, but it was fucking near. It was full choke and took a lot of brick off the wall about five inches from my swede. The cold air filled with the smell of powder, and old straw suddenly flew about the place. When I got inside I said to Sanders: ‘That was nasty. Buckshot, that was.’

She heard me and yelled down: ‘Of course it’s buckshot, and it’s all for you, you pig.’

‘You’re wrecking the building, not us,’ I said, ‘so put that gun up and get lost, will you? You’re finished here, missis, I’ll see to it, now sleep on that.’ I peered at Sanders; he was white-faced and weeping. I was sorry for him now. I felt that we were all of us, without exception, filled with errors and that we knew it, yet had to live through them. It would have been better to be stupid, perhaps even mad. It’s the capacity of knowing that’s the real agony of existence; maybe we would all of us be more honest without knowledge. Yet it was a hall of mirrors: I had a job to do, and do fast in the allotted time, and I was as disturbed over the Mardys as I could ever be. I found I had some Kleenex on me and gave them to Sanders for him to wipe his face, finding rain water in a bucket and saying, are you all right, Sanders?

He looked at me and said: ‘You know Baddeley. I’ll tell you about Baddeley. You know he runs Thornhill?’

‘Yes.’

He sighed: ‘I feel bad at what I’ve done.’

‘What have you done?’

‘It’s as much what I’ve not done.’

‘Over Mrs Mardy?’

‘I wronged her.’

‘Was it money?’

‘Money,’ he breathed, ‘ah yes, money.’

‘Wronged her how?’

‘Wronged her memory, and for money. But when you haven’t any money then you have no memory.’

‘Look, we’re alone here, Dick,’ I said. ‘You can say anything you like, it’ll go no further than it would anyway, I swear.’

‘How far is that?’ he said.

‘That I can’t answer,’ I said. ‘The more I find out about the world by what I do, the more I see how much I don’t know.’

‘I got in the wrong hands,’ he said, ‘young broke people do, we’re used, and then we still have to pay. We pay the Baddeleys, we pay you coppers, why don’t people just finish us off, or better still not have us?’

I had no haven to offer him; in a way I was as helpless as he was. I was strictly bound by the terms of my inquiry into a disappearance, a suspected death. I had to grind on and live, even if I didn’t know why. My silly idea about absolute justice, I wonder if it’s not just an excuse so as to go on talking to people, continue on in the light so as not to have to die, go into the dark. How balance my interest against disinterest? But as a police officer I couldn’t possibly tell Sanders, not even my lover if I had one, any of that. And yet I saw Sanders in that vague light, in that barn, both of us fresh from that drunken fire, exhausted by the shock of it, and I knew by looking at his face that he was begging me, reaching to me for the one thing that I couldn’t give him – help. How alone we are! The one real risk we run is to understand our state: the rest are stupid smiling, cruel or uncaring people, all of them idiots, broken into the confused tragedy of a herd driven forward across hard country to be killed, and at a profit.

‘Don’t ask me if I’m all right if you can’t help me,’ he said. ‘You’d just be taking the piss, I couldn’t stand more jail.’

‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘This has all turned out to be very serious, and I’m in as tight a corner as you are because I have to find out about Mrs Mardy’s fate, and also those responsible for it. If we people didn’t do it, it would really be as if folk died for nothing, might as well never have lived, and then there’d be no such thing as civilization left at all.’

‘I’d never thought of it like that,’ he said, very white and tired, ‘never had such an idea in my life at all.’

‘You’re exhausted,’ I said, ‘you must get some proper sleep.’

‘I seem to have suddenly changed,’ he said, ‘I can’t tell how, but I can’t go back up to sleep in the house now after what’s passed, my mum’d kill me. Anyway I’m better now and don’t feel like sleeping, I’d rather go out and wander while I think.’

I knew what he meant; I often did the same. But I said: ‘It’s no good, I can’t let you do that just yet. Whatever my feelings are I must get an answer to this case, and you’re a key to it; I’m also in a hurry because I’m being hard pushed from London.’

‘I can’t do a deal with the law,’ he said, ‘that’s flat. It would get me killed.’

‘You’ll have to,’ I said, ‘you’ve no choice. I want to keep all this in my own hands; I don’t want you passed over to other officers I know. But the problem for you is, you’ll have to talk.’

‘But I’m afraid.’

‘I know,’ I said, lighting us both a Westminster, ‘but we’re all afraid. Best thing I could do for you is to arrest you for your own good and put you somewhere where you’d be safe but the trouble is I’ve nowhere to put you; I don’t like the police stations out here.’

‘You know about Kedward?’

‘It’s what I feel about him so far. But feeling can turn out to be fact.’