How the Dead Live (Factory 3) (14 page)

Sanders said: ‘Christ what a mess this is.’ He put his head in his hands and groaned with despair: ‘And I thought it was going to be so easy.’

‘What did you think was going to be so easy?’

‘Making the money.’

‘Money for doing what?’

‘Up at the Mardys last year.’

‘What did you do up there?’

‘It started with me reporting on them.’

‘Reporting to who? Baddeley?’

‘Yes.’

‘How much did you get paid?’

‘A thousand down, cash, for a gardening job – I thought, this is wicked this is, it’s fantastic, Christ, a thousand quid? Of course I had to watch on them. That’s how I knew madam was so sick. Sick?’ He tried to vomit.

‘And then what?’

‘It was the electricity strike last September, and the doctor came to Baddeley for some dry ice.’

‘Oh? Dry ice what for?’

‘It wasn’t to make ice cream,’ he said bitterly. ‘What do you think it was for?’

‘There are very few answers to that,’ I said, ‘and I find all of them far out. Is she up there?’

‘I don’t know for sure,’ he said, ‘but I think so. I helped deliver this ice and I see now I was in something too deep for me. If and when it comes to court wouldn’t you put a word in?’

‘I might if I can get a few more words out of you,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Let’s try this one. Was Mardy being blackmailed over this dry ice?’

‘Yes. Baddeley was doing it through a firm called Wildways Estates.’

‘What a pretty name,’ I said, ‘and how did the trick work?’

‘Mardy paid the cheques to Wildways, and that was a way for Baddeley to try and kosher them – you know, lose them so they wouldn’t show in his accounts.’

‘Laundered cheques,’ I said, ‘dirty laundry, it’s nothing but cheques in this bloody business. Still, it’s lucky how stupid these people are just when they think they’re being so clever, I’m always telling folk. All right now again – where the hell is Mrs Mardy? Do you know?’

‘That I can’t tell you,’ he said, ‘and that’s straight up, but I tell you I’m sure she’s up there at Thornhill Court somewhere.’

‘Can’t you tell me any more than that?’

‘I would if I could,’ he said, ‘I swear it.’ He swallowed and said: ‘Aren’t I being any use to you?’

‘Some,’ I said, ‘not much.’

‘Look, over me, be human, will you?’

‘That depends,’ I said, ‘it’s no real part of my job. My job is to help put an end to this case. It’s a snake I must spike and kill.’

‘Try and see it my way,’ said Sanders. ‘I’m twenty-seven with no future – I probably never had one, I was fucked before I got off the ground. Look at this shit-heap. We barely eat here, and the troubles we’ve got are enough to cut your appetite even if you had food in the fridge. Landlord’s solicitors working to get us out, no money for the rent. If not it’s trouble with you lot, or else it’s the council and trouble with the rates, trouble and thunder everywhere. I tell you I wouldn’t mind if there was a way out. But I can’t see one so I thieve because I must live, I’ve got to find a way. There’s Mum and her bottle on one hand, idiot out in the yard on the other, then there’s four more like me with two of them doing bird. The sun never shone on me; I was born to be screwed.’

I knew what he meant; I knew that no matter how much music you played in the motor it could never drown out your trouble, all the trouble of your state.

‘They say our family was respectable down here once,’ he said. ‘Farm labourers, a reputation my grandad slaved his guts out to build, but that’s all finished now. I’d still just like to work, settle down and marry like normal folk do. But there’s no work for a half-skilled man in Thornhill now. It’s not as if we were breaking the law when you take us away; there is no law in Thornhill, only the big villains we try to copy. You people are pissing in the wind when you send us down, and it’s not as though all of you were honest either. Bent or straight, it makes no difference to the hours you do, but at least you know you’ll draw a month’s wages. Only you try getting up at six in the morning without a penny to go plodding out in any weather on foot, hitching down this lane, hacking up that one, going to farms in the season and pulling your hair saying ’scuse me, missis, just looking for work, I’ll tackle anything, and all she says is sorry, we’re not hiring right now but
here’s fifty p. Fifty p, hardly enough to buy you half a pint to drown in. Listen, I’ve got a bird you know and we really get on, only her dad drives a truck for a firm down in Thornhill and they’ve got savings, which puts them in a different class straight away from me. Sally’s dad? Christ, he and his old woman wouldn’t give me the skin off their shit. What, me, with three years’ bird behind me? What would they want their only girl to marry an ex-con for? So what they say is, you come round here again looking for Sally, cunt, and it’s guaranteed birdshot right there where you plant it, darling, now fuck off. So all we can do is go off and be happy with a cassette-player I’ve got and dance to beer in hedges and screw in ditches and that’s our marriage, stars crossing overhead when there are any, and they call that a summer wedding down here because summer’s short. I don’t know whether we’re the new poor or if it was always old; the difference is that they don’t recognize us any more the way they did in the old days. There’s no solidarity here any more, just your own hell; yes, it’s wicked, man.’

‘I’ll do everything I can,’ I said, ‘but you know I’ve got my own folk upstairs to think about.’

‘I know that,’ he said, whereupon I walked straight out of that barn door shouting up to the woman like a fool: ‘You’ve got the other barrel, use it, now’s your chance.’

Nothing happened. ‘Will you be all right?’ I whispered to Sanders in that freezing dark.

‘I’ve got my brother Brad,’ he said, ‘down in town, he’ll look after me.’

Even the idiot had gone, and the house was as lightless as we are in a state of disaster or sleep.

I said to Sanders: ‘Contact me if you’re in bother, but I’d better tell you that we’re short-handed, there’s only me.’

‘Considering who you are and what you do,’ he said, ‘I think you’re all right.’

‘None of us are ever all right,’ I said. ‘We’re all just waiting for the death express.’

The clerk at the hotel was absorbed in the new issue of
Dare, but
he dropped it under the desk when he saw me coming (as if I cared what he read). He didn’t look pleased to see me, but some people never are.

‘Any messages?’

‘Yeah, there’s all this lot,’ he grumbled, pushing it at me. ‘Hey, look, we’re not an answering service here, you know.’

‘Any good citizen’s always anxious to help the police,’ I said.

‘Yeah but there’s a limit to it. There’s been nothing but messages, more messages and still more messages since you got here, and this is supposed to be the slack season.’

‘And I’ll bet it’s the one you like best. And aren’t you bloody lucky, because there’s never any slack season for me.’

‘Why can’t you just do the whole lot through the police station?’ he moaned.

‘Because I don’t want to,’ I said, ‘and that’s all you need bother about.’

He turned his pair of hopeless eyes up at the ceiling and said, ‘Is it all going to take long?’

‘It’ll take as long as it takes,’ I said, ‘and think this over – I’d go to exactly the same amount of trouble if it was you who had disappeared.’

I went upstairs, sat down on the bed, took my shoes off and looked at the top message. It was an order to ring the voice, so I rang it.

‘At last,’ it said. ‘What the hell are you doing down there? Have you found out anything about this Mardy woman yet?’

‘A good deal, yes.’

‘Like what?’

‘That’s bad grammar, sir.’

‘As long as you understand it,’ said the voice, ‘my grammar’s good enough. Well?’

‘To start with, the husband’s been blackmailed over her.’

‘What for? Who by?’

‘I’ve got the name, but I need some checking done into some banking transactions.’

‘Oh, not more banking.’

‘Banking and vanishing are often very closely linked,’ I said, ‘you know that as well as I do. Anyway you can take it that it’s to do with this voyage that the man says his wife went off on.’

‘Will you try and be a little clearer?’ said the voice. ‘What sort of a voyage was it? Sea? Air? Rail? Have you tried tracing the ticket?’

‘It was the kind of voyage you don’t need any ticket for. Last autumn Mardy took delivery of a load of dry ice, and you know what you use that stuff for.’

‘Yes, corpses,’ said the voice. ‘Let me think, dry ice will freeze them right down to—’

‘And where do you get it from?’

‘It’s not easy – the morgue, I suppose.’

‘Yes. Or?’

‘I don’t know – wait – an undertaker’s, maybe.’

‘Now we’re getting there,’ I said, ‘an undertaker’s. Exactly.’

‘Stop flourishing your logic in my ear,’ said the voice, ‘will you? Anyway, this woman’s dead, is that it?’

‘You can be one hundred per cent sure of that,’ I said. ‘You don’t need to freeze the living.’

‘Where’s the body, then? Anywhere near you?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘Why do you think so?’

‘Because I’ve got a witness – a lad who helped deliver the dry ice. He’s a no-hoper in his twenties with three years’ form called Dick, or Richard Sanders. He’s an accessory to murder, of course, when we find the body, because even counsel with L-plates on
could prove that Sanders knew what that delivery was and what it was for.’

‘But why would the man want to freeze his wife?’

‘That’s the part I don’t know yet, but I’ll find out if I do it my way. Sanders also, on his own admission, says he received a thousand quid cash for his part in the job and what’s more, he worked for the Mardys over the period that interests us as a gardener.’

‘Sounds as if he’s in trouble,’ said the voice, ‘people like that always are. Have you arrested him?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Firstly because it doesn’t suit me to just yet and secondly because I’ve nowhere to put him.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ said the voice. ‘What do you think a police station’s for?’

‘The first thing it’s for in my view,’ I said, ‘is to lock Inspector Kedward up in, and that’s where he’ll end up by the time I’ve finished with him.’

‘Oh Christ, is he really bent?’

‘I haven’t the proof yet, but I’m convinced of it. It’s the only way to explain his behaviour over Mrs Mardy that I can see.’

‘The whole thing’s very confusing the way you’re telling it,’ said the voice, ‘and I don’t like the Kedward part of it at all.’

‘It’s not my fault the man’s bent,’ I said, ‘and any case is confusing no matter who’s telling the story, especially if you’re in the middle of it.’

‘All right,’ said the voice, ‘what else have you got?’

‘There’s this blackmail angle.’

‘Any names there in the fairy tale?’

‘Yes, I’ve got one good fairy and one very bad one, apart from Kedward and Sanders. The good one’s a very interesting man called Colonel A’Court Newington; he knows a lot about the Mardys and I’ve a message here asking me to contact him. The naughty one’s a man called Walter Baddeley and he runs a company whose finances I want checked out – Wildways Estates, with registered offices in Thornhill.’

‘Tell me more about Baddeley.’

‘He’s a man of many activities,’ I said. ‘He has political ambitions, he’s an estate agent, a property dealer, and guess what else he is? An undertaker. Have you put Kedward on the computer yet? Because while you’re at it I want every payment made to or by Wildways Estates checked. And talking of Wildways, the computer can go through Baddeley’s personal account as well.’

‘You’ve got an obsession about banking in this case, Sergeant, it seems to me.’

‘Yes, and with some reason,’ I said, ‘because money, murder and blackmail often jingle happily along together hand in hand; they make a sweet little nursery tune together – it’s called motive. Sometimes another pretty little instrument joins in too,’ I added. ‘It’s called greed, and I certainly think it’s joined in here.’

‘I just hope you’re not giving the computer a lot of work for nothing.’

‘It’s no work for the computer,’ I said irritably. ‘They link it to the appropriate bank terminal and it’ll whip through that lot in a few seconds. Tell them to search back to January eighty-four and then ask them to get me the photostats of any cheque made out for more than a hundred pounds – and how soon can I have it, five minutes ago could be too late.’

The voice sighed. ‘I’ll have it sent down by courier.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Once I’ve found what I think I’m going to find in there I’ll get along a lot faster.’

‘I’ll say this much for you, Sergeant, you usually do get on fast,’ said the voice. ‘Tell me another thing, now – what about this man Newington, where does he fit?’

‘Newington’s a retired colonel, served throughout World War Two in the artillery; he was at Dunkirk. He was also a magistrate and a man whose word I would accept without thinking twice, and that’s something I very seldom say about anybody, you know me. He’s old and very sick and lives on his own in a big house. His fiancée was killed in 1940, machine-gunned by a German fighter outside the south coast hospital where she was working as a nurse.’

‘I’ve never heard you be so poetic over anyone before,’ said the voice. ‘You seem to think a lot of him.’

‘I do,’ I said, ‘he’s the kind of man I’d like to be when I’m old.’

‘All right,’ said the voice, ‘leaving all that aside, what makes him so interesting?’

‘First, because he knew the Mardys very well and liked them. Second, it was Newington who went to the Chief Constable about Mrs Mardy. It was not, I repeat not, Inspector Kedward.’

‘How do you know it was Newington?’

‘It’s ridiculously simple,’ I said. ‘He told me. You’ve got to remember,’ I added, ‘how popular Mrs Mardy was in the area, particularly with her concerts. Everybody liked and respected them. But it needed a man with Colonel Newington’s authority to take action when the local police did nothing about her, and he took it.’

‘Quite irregular.’