How the Dead Live (Factory 3) (20 page)

‘Shrivelled little old wife to pour the drinks into the cut glass?’ I said. ‘Disadvantaged foreign slavey for the pots and pans?’

‘I don’t know how you guess these things.’

‘They smell,’ I said, ‘and from a long way off.’

‘Yes, the wife’s a poor little woman – dead red hair, no bust, the kind of woman no one ever wants to sin with and who dreams of murder.’

‘I get the feeling he’s queer myself,’ I said, ‘if he’s anything.’

‘Funny you should say that. I had a word with the Portuguese girl in the kitchen and it seems he’s got a boyfriend called Prince, but he was out.’

‘You haven’t been wasting your time, have you?’ I said.

‘He came back while I was there. Big, blond, about thirty, nice blow job for a hair-do, pretty clothes, you know, sharp, tattooed I Love You Irene left forearm, heart and arrow, London accent, East End, Hackney or Bethnal Green, I’ve a feeling I’ve seen him before somewhere.’

‘Probably in some court.’

‘His name’s Johnny. Anyway, Baddeley wanted me all to himself – so much so that I thought I was going to have to hang on to my chair and think of Angie, and he sent the wife and the blond help out of the room fast.’

‘You’ve been doing very well,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, as long as you didn’t mention me.’

‘Not a chance.’

‘The whole thing stinks all over,’ I said, ‘I do love a villain when he appears to settle down like that, settle down to make money I mean. So go on.’

‘He snowed me a bit first, he was cagey, but I told him he hadn’t a thing to worry about – I was doing a piece for the paper, the property page, called Big Shots in Little Towns. He liked that. I asked him if he was interested in property dealing still and he said well of course, I’m the biggest estate agent in Thornhill, I’m always ready to buy at the right price. Thornhill, he said, is now a very popular part of the world, connections to London, the Midlands, where you like; it’s picturesque, which of course means select. Talking of people buying into the region I’m careful, no rubbish wanted, I’m not in the business of driving the market downhill. I had a nice Indian gentleman the other day after Longstreet Manor, I’ll pay cash he said and I’ll up your commission on it don’t worry, but I said regretfully, sir, and quite frankly, the only colour we have here in Thornhill is white, we don’t want splashes on it do we, ha
ha. Got some big properties on your books right now? I said. Plenty, he said, mind, they don’t hang around long with me, I get them out at a keen price to the right buyer. Have you got a building firm to do them all up, together with the rest of what you do, local undertaker and all the rest of it? I most certainly have, he said, I can price work better if I’m employing. Of course I don’t pay high wages, but there’s still some youngsters around who’d rather do an honest day’s toil than draw sup. ben. Besides, I’m running for mayor shortly as you may or may not know, and that naturally means I take pity on the numerous Thornhill unemployed and try to slot them into a job when I can. I said, I find you disarmingly open, Mr Baddeley, and it must be money for old rope, but he curled a bit on that one and said I think that’s putting it rather stark, Mr who was it you said again? I gave him plenty of soothing flannel to get him round and then said well, what with property and funerals, I suppose they almost go hand in hand, Mr Baddeley, you certainly seem to have backed the favourites in life’s great race. I wouldn’t put it like that at all, he snapped, and if you print that in your paper you’ll have my lawyers after you in no time flat.’

‘Messrs Carrow & Carrow,’ I said.

‘All right, I said, now there’s another thing that comes to my mind – could you shed any light on a matter that seems to be mystifying people in this area, the disappearance of a Mrs Mardy who lived up the road from you here? I could see he didn’t like that brought up, but naturally he couldn’t say so. Seems funny a property journalist raising that question, he said, or is that what you’re really down here about? No, I said, but things get about in Fleet Street, that’s why it’s full of newspapers, you know, and what’s livened the dish up is the rumour that the local police here haven’t been doing their job over it, and it seems that there’s even a police officer been sent down from London to like stick a pin in them, as I say it’s just a rumour of course. It’s the kind of rumour that had best remain a rumour, he said coldly, otherwise some people might find themselves running into a writ server. All right, I said,
however, as a leading figure in Thornhill you must have some view on the matter. He turned his eyes up at that in his best funeral way and said, I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything, if only I could, poor Mrs Mardy, a wonderful woman, her disappearance is, and I fear will remain, a complete mystery and it is of course very very sad. Do you know her husband, Dr Mardy, at all, I said, and he wrung his hands and said no, hardly at all, poor desolate old man. I see, I said, well thank you very much indeed for your time, Mr Baddeley – here’s my phone number, home and office, and thank you again for your valuable help, I’ll show myself out, I said, and that was that.’

‘Isn’t it weird?’ I said, when I had thought about what he had said for a while, ‘your job’s exactly like mine in many ways. And don’t you get fed up with being lied to all the time? Talking of time,’ I added, ‘what is the time?’

‘They’re open, if that’s what you mean,’ said Cryer. ‘I’ve found a nice little pub called the Eddystone Light and I’ll buy you a drink if you like, the last round was yours on the McGruder business.’

So we went over, he set the drinks up on a table and I said: ‘You know, I could have made some sort of a detective out of you.’

‘I wouldn’t have liked the money or the hours, cheers.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘they’re certainly both rotten, it’s no job for a married man and tell me some more about lovely Angela.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve protected her from her worst errors so far.’ He took a drink of his beer and sighed: ‘Errors such as going out on her own at night while I’m at work and chatting up villains in pubs in Paddington and along the Baize. She’s trying to write a thriller of all things and says she prowls around to get what she calls local colour.’

‘It’s a colour that could turn bright red one of these days,’ I said. ‘You must be mad, you ought to stop her.’

‘Try stopping an express train with your foot.’

‘Maybe if she had a kid she’d stay at home more, I know that’s what I used to think with Edie.’

He shook his head: ‘You’re completely out of date, it doesn’t work like that at all. Not any more.’ He added: ‘You got over all that business well.’

‘Half over,’ I said, ‘it never really finishes.’

‘What are you telling me to do about Baddeley?’

‘Get after him in your own way,’ I said, ‘but not till I tell you, and leave the Mardy end of the whole thing to me.’

‘Couldn’t you give me some angle on the blackmail part of it now? Like how Baddeley got his hands on the Mardys? Anything?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I couldn’t. Not yet.’

He said impatiently: ‘I can’t stretch this job out for ever.’

‘You won’t have to,’ I said. I finished my drink and stood up. ‘Keep in touch with me – but always remember, there mightn’t be a story after all.’

‘I have a feeling there will be,’ Cryer said.

The light was failing and it was snowing on a north wind as I drove back up to Mardy’s; a last shred of sun, a blood-spot in a lazy eye, clouded in grey, fled to sink behind the land that reached back to clumps of naked oak. I wound down the window, but freezing air whipped at me through the gap and I shut it again quickly. The gates by the side of the road were wide open and I edged in past the rotten pillars.

Now I saw by the final light what I had only sensed in the dark the time before. Now appeared the murderous abandon of the park – shrubs that had once been planted in orderly groups shrank like wet beggars; they flailed and thrashed, unpruned, under diseased elms staggering in the gale. I stopped the car, got out and looked up at the ruin of the house, high, wet and hideous.

As I stood there I suddenly felt afraid – not of what confronted me but in a general way. I thought and felt that the secret of existence was perhaps to get old with beauty, ironically, coming closer and closer to you as you aged; innocence, everything that you had rejected or ignored as a young man, entering you like music all the time until in the end there was no more time. Then much of what had seemed so hard would be over, after too much work in cities, after patrolling too many streets for too long, after studying too many faces with the sly, fixed look of the dead.

Intelligence is at the service of us all and I believe that curiosity and investigation, like a chicken’s beak, are intended to kill the viper that threatens an egg. Powerful curiosity is the source of all detection and is surely its own end, a field cleared and well ploughed – but it is too simple for us only to have justice and logic; what use are either without mercy? The eternal cycle, the beginning, middle and end of a human being, the
incomprehensible dance in the magic of our own theatre will continue for ever. But ignorance of our birth and death makes us largely mad; the majority of us clap at our disasters as though they were a play; but it is a work that we cannot possibly understand. Throughout our obscure race in life our entire frame is intended, is inclined to return to the earth on which our parents lay flat to conceive us; from a great distance our planet is an extraordinary sight, more so than most of us can yet understand, and I think that in the meantime we ought to be very careful about how we treat the flesh that we are. As I looked up at the house I found myself thinking, I don’t know why, of men in fields leaning on the wind, their arms crossed on the working end of their rakes, their clothes blowing round their motionless bodies. Whether in heat or cold they stared off beyond their farms to judge the clouds and the sun; in each season they were wise over the earth. They planted at the right time and lived mostly alone in fields that were never theirs, trapping a bird for food with a wire or stones, stripping mushrooms from dead bark with the vast patience that a people has.

Now they have been carried off to the night. Their grandchildren work in banks and tax offices, often commit murder and rape at weekends; because of war, because of our past, a catastrophe has occurred which no single man, though he may endure it, can ever solve – chatty, puffy ministers, over the past century, have committed the greatest crime of all; it was made up of expediency, self-interest and indifference. But all I can do about it is to go on catching criminals until I get too old.

Now I could see the gravel of the drive cluttered with the masonry that had crashed outwards from above. A mass of the corner wall had broken away, leaving an angle like the ruin of a tooth to rise in unsteady pinnacles to the sky. I turned my collar up, my face peeled by the cold, and walked along under the facade of the house, gazing up at the tons of rubble bowing overhead. Then I went to the great double panes of the front door and passed through them.

Much that I hadn’t been able to see on my last visit was now apparent. The hall was at least fifty feet high and rose to a glass ceiling. Three galleries ran round the hall, serving the storeys; soaring above them was the organ, the round windows of its loft like the portholes of a liner. Ranks of pipes spreadeagled upwards, leaning into or away from each other at absurd angles. Half-effaced saints painted on them in red, blue and gold indicated the Gothic script that described their sayings or lives; draughts cracked and snarled across the hall, booming into the pipes which responded with groans or howls. I turned slowly on the marble floor, half an inch deep in rain, listening to the branches thrashing in the wind against the walls, listening for anything.

‘Dr Mardy?’ I called out.

There was no reply. I walked over to a wall on which a great canvas hung, its lower part half lost in the shadows. By my torch I saw that it was titled
The Inspiration of Alphaeus –
a young man with wings for hands and feet, demons yawning blackly after him, ascended to the ceiling. I walked off down the hall, opened a door at random and was met with all the desolation that I had seen before; I was in the remains of a dining-room. Chairs were pushed back from some ancient dinner party and ten glasses filled with rotten liquid stood on the table, cutlery lying where it had been flung down. The smell in that tight-shut, soaking place was terrible, like the smell of death itself. The poles at the windows had broken and collapsed, hurling the velvet curtains across the floor. The shutters had come unhinged and were shored up with planks; a rat nodded at me and scuttled into a corner. Beyond the cracked or absent panes, against the freezing dark sky, I watched the wild branches as they continued to sway and batter each other in the wind, and still Mardy did not come.

At that moment I became aware of the voices again.

I hadn’t been altogether sure about them the time before, but now I definitely was. Besides, they were louder. I couldn’t yet make out what they said because they were too far off but I could tell that a man and a woman were having some urgent conversation – was
it a quarrel, or that violent pleading which comes almost to the same thing?

‘Mardy!’ I called out again. ‘Dr Mardy!’ But my voice only rang emptily back at me.

I also wished immediately that I hadn’t spoken; my words seemed to have provoked a new sound, for there came the crash as of a fist on a table from upstairs and a man shouted, quite clearly now: ‘Don’t you see I can’t go on?’ There was a woman’s answer but it got fainter again, as though the people had moved into rooms further off.

Now I was sweating, yet I felt icy cold. I was convinced that the woman’s voice I was listening to was dead, that it was Marianne Mardy’s; but that didn’t alter the fact that I was sure I was hearing it. She sobbed on as I stood in the dark downstairs and I felt as cold as we all do in the presence of madness and death.

I thought: ‘I’ve got to find the stairs.’ I did find them and climbed until I found myself at the banisters of the second gallery. The moon shone for a moment, glaring through the glass roof; far down shone the marble of the hall floor, glittering in water. Around me, draughts groaned through the doors, many of them open, of what had been bedrooms; cold, bitter air blew in, mixed with the soft scent of decay. I shone my light into one of them as I stole past. Wet bedding lay tumbled on the floor; clothes from another age sprawled half out of a wardrobe. I went on, and the two voices got louder all the time until there was no further to go at the end of the gallery and I was faced by a shut door. As far as I could tell I was at the wrecked end of the house, and by putting my ear to the panels of the door I could for the first time listen clearly to what they were saying in there.