Engleby (24 page)

The police are therefore saying that this killing is unrelated to the long, squalid sequence that goes back to 1975. The modus operandi (as the, presumably Latin-speaking, West Yorkshire plods insist on calling it) is different; the area is one the killer hasn’t been in before and the victim wasn’t a pro. They are therefore looking for ‘someone other’ than the serial killer – and since they don’t know who he is yet, this new one’s very ‘other’ indeed.

I wouldn’t be so sure if I were them. This killer isn’t as perfect as the papers make out. It’s possible that as many as eight of his 20 intended victims so far have survived. That’s not the work of someone who’s exactly on top of things, is it? That’s an assault-to-death conversion rate of only 60 per cent. Plus, Farsley, as any map will tell you, is very close to his centre of gravity. Suppose he was on his way to Chapeltown to find a prostitute to kill. Then maybe he saw this poor woman walking home – and he couldn’t wait. If you’re mad enough to have killed a dozen people you’re mad enough to be a fraction impatient. Surely?

But the police ‘psychologists’ now have pride and money riding on their theories. They’re so attached to their patterns that they’ve forgotten rule one of human behaviour: there are no patterns. People just do things. There’s no such thing as a coherent and fully integrated human personality, let alone consistent motivation.

They know from footprints at several crime scenes that the guy’s got a size seven shoe with severe uneven wear on the ball of the right foot, suggesting that he drives long-haul for a living. Every survivor says he has a dark beard. He left a new five-pound note, serial number AW51 121565, at the site of the murder of Jean Jordan, a prostitute whose head he had tried to cut off, in 1977. The new note went into payrolls in the heart of his area of operations on the day before the murder. The only way they think it can have crossed the Pennines within 24 hours, to Manchester, where Jean Jordan was killed, is if the man who had it in his pay packet took it with him.

The bank supplied the note in a payroll, though – surprisingly – it can’t say which one. It might have gone to one of 30 companies in the area, and thence to one of 8,000 men.

But how many of those 30 firms are haulage companies, employing drivers? Maybe three? How many drivers in that total? Maybe a hundred? How many of those drivers are of medium height with black beards? Eight? Five? How many of those don’t have bulletproof alibis for every night in question? Two? One?

Circumstantial evidence, eyewitness evidence, footprints, serial numbers . . . How much more do they want? How difficult
is
this?

Sometimes I don’t do pubs in the evening, sometimes I go to wine bars. There are certain ones that have a reputation for being places you can pick up girls. For instance there’s one called the Loose Box, which Stellings told me about. I’m not sure he’s ever been there, I think he just liked the name. It’s in Knightsbridge. I made the mistake of going there on a Thursday lunchtime. It had women all right, but they didn’t want to sleep with you. They were people who’d come up for the day from Gloucestershire to go shopping; they’d come to look at curtain fabrics in Harrods, to go to drapery and get the little men in shiny suits with shiny hair to haul down the heavy bolts of chintz. I listened to them as I stood at the bar. They had a ‘light’ lunch, but they talked one another into white wine, and it’s cheaper by the bottle.

In the evening, it was different. No one sat down and no one ate. There wasn’t room for tables because the floor space was jammed with groups of young women shouting and smoking round a bottle of searingly dry white wine. Men in ones and twos worked through them, occasionally managing to detach a single woman from her group. Some men carried bottles at the ready. They persevered, though few had much to offer at first sight: many were grey, had thick sideburns or wore ties with the designer’s name printed on the front.

I was standing near two women in their thirties. One wore leopardskin-print trousers, the other a miniskirt. They appraised the men, while trying to seem absorbed by one another; occasionally they pointed or conferred.

You sensed a man’s anxiety when he had to return to the bar and shove and wave folded banknotes at the keeper of the lacerating Muscadet; by the time he’d got wine and forced his way back to the woman he’d prised away, her group had recombined, made new unstable combinations and his girl was blocked: a man with a camel coat over his shoulders was dangling Jaguar keys and making her simper.

After an hour of standing next to the same two women, I knew that no one had yet spoken to them. I suppose I’d drunk a bottle and a half of the house red by then, and I said something to the one in the leopardskin trousers. She gave a single-word answer. I offered her and her friend a drink from my bottle and they backed off as though appalled – as though I’d suggested that they’d come to this seething, deafening room on Friday night to be – what was that expression – to be . . .
picked up
! They turned their backs on me. I left the remainder of the bottle on the corner of the bar and went back to the 1100. I thought of pulling over in Star Street, rolling down the window to a waiting tom and asking her to get inside. It might have been worth it just to see her face; it might have been worth it just to see if she’d say, ‘What do you
take
me for?’

Last weekend Julie came up to stay for a couple of days. She’s nineteen years old now and works in the brewery offices. The ‘signs of promise’ at school didn’t come to much and my mother needed more money to help with the house. I met her at the station and walked her over to my room.

‘It’s nice, Mike,’ she said, turning round in the small space, looking for somewhere to put her bag down.

‘I’m getting somewhere bigger soon,’ I said. ‘With my big new salary.’

I made some tea while she sat on the bed.

‘Where’s the toilet?’

‘At the end of the landing. Here. Take this.’ I threw her a roll of paper. At least I didn’t, like the landlord of the Tickell Arms, make her pay for it.

She wanted to watch
Jim’ll Fix It
on television, and I made some tea while a whey-faced lad from Bolton got to spend the day as a steward on a cruise ship going to the Norwegian fjords.

‘Can I meet your friends, Mike?’

‘I’m not sure if anyone’s around this weekend,’ I said. ‘How’s Mum?’

‘Oh, you know. Up and down.’

Jules seemed a bit nervous. She was sipping tea from a Beecham’s mug I’d been given at a press conference.

‘When did you last come to London?’ I said.

‘I’ve only been the once. You know that, Mike. That time we all came up. When Dad was still alive. When we went to Madame Whatsits.’

‘I remember.’

‘And you bought me that model of a bus.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes. You were always generous.’

I wondered where I’d got the money. ‘You gave me nice presents, too.’

‘Remember the Donny Osmond tee shirt? Mum was a bit shocked!’

She was wearing a cheap skirt that was tight across her knees as she perched on the edge of the bed.

I felt terribly sorry for her – with her funny little face and the wavy hair that she’d had cut like the dark one in Abba – too long and with too many layers. She had a velvet choker and a tight sweater and clumpy shoes.

‘Have you got a boyfriend, Jules?’

‘I’m not telling you, Mr Nosey!’

She blushed at her own daring and I looked away, feeling I shouldn’t have asked. What was her life like? All the junior execs and accountants at the brewery probably ogled her, made half-hearted passes. She wasn’t anyone’s dream girl, but at the Christmas party, after a few drinks, she’d probably do. Was she still what Jennifer would have called ‘virg int’? I hoped she’d put the right value on it, so she could marry a notch or two above herself.

‘And have you got a girlfriend, Mike?’

‘Not at the moment.’

‘I’ve never met any of your girlfriends.’

‘I know.’

‘There’s a girl works at the brewery with me. I think you’d like her. She’s clever – you know, like you. Uses long words, knows lots of things.’

‘Useless information?’

‘No, no! She’s ever so nice, Mike, really, you’d like her. She’s called Linda. She’s head of accounts. She went to university and everything.’

‘How old is she?’

‘Twenty-seven, I think. Same sort of age as you. She just split up with her boyfriend.’

‘So I could go in-off.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. I’ll look her up in when I’m next in Reading.’

Might be fun. We could talk screw-cap economies in the old light-ale market.

I offered Jules a Benson & Hedges, which she accepted with an appreciative murmur. I couldn’t think what on earth to do with her. We couldn’t really drive round the pubs, though maybe . . .

‘Would you like to see King’s Road?’ I said.

It was a winter evening, dark already. One thing I like about London is that when you step out into the night, it just swallows you. It’s democratic, too. You can sweep past the palace, roar through the ‘royal’ parks, down the white pillared terraces of South Kensington, and no one stops you; no one stands in your way like Baynes and says, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

We drove through the park, which I thought Jules would like, down to a pub I knew off Cheyne Walk. She drank gin and bitter lemon, thinking, I suppose, that that was what London girls drank. In fact, the London girls in Cheyne Walk drank cheap wine, vodka and tonic and draught Australian or American lager, made ‘under licence’ (as though there were a patent on water, flavouring and carbon dioxide) and transported in metal-barrelled mega-tankers that could barely squeeze down the narrow Chelsea streets, past Carlyle’s old house, maybe shaking the very fireplace where Mill’s maid had used the only manuscript copy of Carlyle’s
History of the French Revolution
to get a good blaze going. (Interestingly, it was Carlyle, I read, who later had to comfort the distraught Mill.)

Jules swivelled her eyes round the pub as she kept the glass stuck to her top lip. I didn’t think much of the place, but I suppose if your movement is limited to Trafalgar Terrace, work, and back again, then anything else can look seductive. The yellowish light in the bar was good; some of the people were residents, they weren’t all tourists or strangers, like me; you could feel, like Stellings with the title song of
Saturday Night Fever
, that there was something going on. Then we went to another place I knew, hidden in a square, but I sensed Julie was getting hazy with gin – or, given pub measures, more likely drunk on bitter lemon – and we went up to a bistro on King’s Road, Dominic’s perhaps, with a strong sense of people spending their week’s money.

Julie wanted avocado with prawns, so I ordered it too and she looked happy.

‘Do you remember Dad?’ she said.

‘Of course.’

‘Do you miss him?’

‘It’s been so long.’

‘I do,’ she said, pushing a piece of buttered brown bread between her lips. She wouldn’t have wine; I had to order a Coke for her. Coke with shellfish. God.

‘Do you remember him?’ I said. ‘You were only – what – four when he died.’

‘No, not really. Tell me about him, Mike.’

I poured some wine for myself. ‘Dad was . . . I don’t know, Jules, how do you ever know what it’s like to be another person?’

‘Oh, please, Mike. Do try.’

‘I think Dad was someone who lived like an animal.’

‘That’s not very nice.’

‘I mean, I don’t think he could ever lift his eyes from the ground. Like a badger. Do you think a badger knows there’s a sky? Do you think a mouse has seen the moon? Does a dog even know that it’s a dog?’

Jules laughed, a little nervously. ‘You are funny, Mike.’

‘We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don’t know what I’m doing.’

I could feel her looking at me.

‘I don’t think Dad ever reached a level much above a dog’s. He’d been beaten and he beat. He was beaten by his life as a slum child, as a young man in the navy, then a worker in a factory. He was caught and he could never look up. He could never lift his eyes. He had no freedom of action. He didn’t really miss anything because he never knew it was there.’

‘What do you mean, “he beat”?’

‘Did he ever hit you?’

‘No.’

‘He beat me. Not that often, I suppose. The funny thing is, I can hardly remember it now. The first time was when he was angry. He hit me in the face with his hand open, like this. Then he hit me with a walking stick, like a schoolmaster.’

‘Why was he always angry with you?’

‘He wasn’t. It became a habit. But I can hardly remember what it felt like. It’s like everything that happens to you. It doesn’t feel real.’

Julie didn’t say anything for a long time as she worked through her steak, well done.

Then eventually she said, ‘I miss him, Mike. Now it’s too late. I remember how he used to ruffle my hair and that. That’s about all I remember really. And at the time I just thought . . . I just thought that’s what life’s like. Everyone has a dad. Then he wasn’t there any more, and I felt like all my life had been just a dream. Then I’d woken up. But maybe I’ll wake up again. Do you know what I mean, Mike? It’s like I could be in a dream now. Still.’