How the Dead Live (Factory 3) (24 page)

‘Hell varies,’ I said, breaking my arm free, ‘and talking of that place, who the fuck are you?’

I didn’t know him.

‘I’m Fox,’ he shouted. ‘Detective-Inspector Fox. Fox by name and Fox by nature, that’s me.’

‘There’s no need to boast about what you can’t help,’ I said. ‘Now get off me.’

‘You cheeky bastard,’ he said, ‘you want to watch your step.’

‘And you mind you don’t break an arm,’ I said. ‘Now hop back into your panda, go back where you came from, fuck off out of here, go on, do it.’

‘I’m going to put in a report about your behaviour!’ he shouted.

‘It’ll just be ink wasted,’ I said. ‘Now go away, I’ve got a lot on my mind.’

‘You don’t understand!’ he screamed, waving his warrant card at me, ‘I’m working out of Serious Crimes.’

‘Work your way back to them then,’ I said, ‘nobody ordered you.’

‘If you’ve got to quarrel, gents,’ said the night porter, suddenly arriving, ‘would you mind doing it somewhere else? The other guests are trying to sleep.’

Fox said: ‘We’re police.’

‘I don’t give a fuck who you are,’ said the night porter. ‘I’ve not committed any crime so far and what I say in this hotel goes until
six in the morning when I go to bed, and I advise you to do the same before I get fed up. If you’re both in love or something there are the rooms upstairs, but keep it quiet, will you?’

He drifted off. I said to Fox: ‘You one of Charlie Bowman’s mob? Yes? I thought so. Well, I know Charlie a great deal better than you do, and let me give you the strength of this, Inspector, and tell you what my thinking is. You’ve just been promoted, Charlie’s been lumbered with you, you’re brand new and silly and he’s sent you down here just to get you off his back and on to mine – anything to get rid of you for a while, he thinks that by pestering me you might get your motor run in a bit. Now don’t be tempted. I’m going to tell you what you’re going to do next. You’re going to turn quietly round, pretend you’ve never seen me if you know what’s good for you, and steer off back up the motorway to the smoke. Tell Charlie from me that this is my case, I’m warning you nicely, but if I get another sniff of you, you funny little artist, I might well be clumsier next time, are you with me?’

He could hardly help being, and had turned white. ‘You’re in for a lot of trouble over this,’ he said, ‘you do realize. I’ve been sent down here officially to help you clear this business up, whether you want me to or not.’

‘It’s my case,’ I said. ‘I’ll handle it the way I do all my work, entirely in my own way, and I absolutely will not cooperate with you, I don’t need you, now leave.’

‘You’re only a sergeant,’ he sneered, ‘you could get fired if you go on like this.’

‘They’ve never got round to it yet,’ I said. ‘Why? Do you fancy yourself at A14? I’ll be blunt, I don’t think you’re the right material.’

‘I think I could change all that,’ he said softly, ‘about your being fired.’

‘Do it, princess,’ I said, ‘and clear up all the shit if you can, but my view is that you’re just piss and wind, wooden-top, so get clear of me.’

‘You think you’re finished with me, do you?’

‘I don’t have to think hard about what I know.’

He went red as a poisoned berry. ‘All right, Sergeant. If that’s the way you want it.’

‘I do,’ I said, ‘now piss off, get back to traffic control, I’m busy. Never ever interfere with a case of mine again, and you might live to draw your pension.’

‘For the last time, Sergeant, I’m reminding you of my rank.’

‘The fact that you have to remind me of mine,’ I said, ‘means that you don’t deserve yours. Christ only knows how you ever passed for inspector – my God, you must have been on form that day.’

The voice rang me at seven thirty in the morning, my last on the Mardy business as things turned out. It said: ‘I’m having the most frightful time up here. I’ve got Detective-Inspector Fox screaming at me that he’s going to break your neck.’

‘He had his chance to and didn’t take it,’ I said.

‘What the hell did you think you were doing, sending him back like that?’

‘I didn’t need him at all,’ I said. ‘I never ordered him, it isn’t his case.’

‘You cheeky sod,’ said the voice. ‘He went down by agreement with me and Chief Inspector Bowman to help you along with it.’

‘Well, I just helped him back into his car,’ I said. ‘You should have asked me first.’

‘Are you inferring that Fox can’t do his job?’

‘I don’t need a rat to do a tango at a funeral,’ I said, ‘I’ll put it that way – all I wanted to do was get rid of him, and please don’t send me people down on these things with new buttons on, he can hardly do without a bib at mealtimes yet.’

‘You know this is all going to go further,’ said the voice, ‘and this time I don’t think I’ll be able to cover you.’

‘I’ll survive,’ I said.

‘Maybe,’ said the voice, ‘but not in the police, I don’t think.’

‘Well that’ll be just too bad,’ I said. ‘Now until I’m finished here just keep people like Bowman and Fox right out of my way.’

‘We’re wondering whether to take you off this case.’

‘Keep wondering,’ I said, ‘but don’t do it now, it’s solved.’

‘What about this woman then? Where is she?’

‘In a deep-freeze,’ I said, ‘and in anybody’s view except her
husband’s she is dead, and has been since last August.’

‘Will you stop talking in riddles?’ the voice snapped. ‘Exactly where does the husband come into it? Tell me what you mean.’

I told him, and at the end of the recital the voice said, Christ.

‘So you see,’ I said, ‘the inside of this town looks like spaghetti junction, everything and everyone’s entwined with everything else; Mardy himself is only one factor.’

‘Yes, you’ve made yourself clear,’ said the voice, ‘you usually do, I’ll say that much. I don’t know what’s going on down in the country these days.’

‘I think they’ve been watching too much bad television,’ I said, ‘but within twenty-four hours I’ll at least be able to make plenty of arrests.’ I added: ‘Like six.’

‘Including this Inspector Kedward?’

‘Of course. I’ve got proof that he accepted bribes. So there’ll be him to stay, his wife for running a dishonest gambling club, Mardy, Dick Sanders for accepting money to deliver the dry ice knowing that he was helping to conceal a death, Walter Baddeley and his assistant Johnny Prince for extortion and blackmail. I might need help making the arrests,’ I added. ‘I can hardly lodge them in Thornhill police station, not under the circumstances.’

‘You sent the help back.’

‘No, that was a hindrance,’ I said. ‘I will not be told how to work a job by a man like Fox.’

‘You might have to face up to the fact that Bowman’ll come down,’ said the voice. ‘I don’t know yet.’

‘I do, though,’ I said. ‘If he does come down it’ll be because he can smell a headline in it. I’ll have cleared up all the shit; all he’ll have to do is make the arrests and cart them off, these people, then take the credit.’

‘I will not have you talking about your superiors in that way,’ said the voice. ‘I’ve warned you countless times.’

‘It’s the truth, though,’ I said, ‘you’ll see how it turns out.’

‘I’ve just made peace between you two,’ said the voice
mournfully. ‘When I think of the trouble I went to.’

‘You shouldn’t have bothered,’ I said. ‘Peace can never last long between Charlie and me. In any case,’ I added, ‘I want Mardy left to me.’

‘Why?’ shouted the voice. ‘He kills his wife as the result of a series of illegal operations, conceals her death—’

‘He believes he had a reason to behave as he did, and I can follow it. I will not have him handed over to Bowman. Anyway I’ve made a deal with him.’

‘You had absolutely no right! The law—’

‘It was the truth I was after,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t that what we wanted?’

‘You’ll be telling me you’re sorry for Mardy next.’ ‘I am.’

‘We’re not in the pitying business,’ said the voice.

‘No,’ I said, ‘and may God have mercy on us.’

‘There’s such a thing as police procedure, Sergeant.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Part of it’s called resigning.’

‘You’ll bloody well see this job through,’ the voice said.

‘Only on my terms, though. No one but me is to interfere with Mardy, understand?’

‘You’re the only low-ranking detective I’ve ever heard of who dared talk to a deputy commander like that.’

‘We might as well be clear,’ I said, ‘is it yes or no?’

‘I’ll have to think about it.’

‘Well, make up your mind,’ I said, ‘there isn’t much time left on this one.’

‘Oh Christ,’ said the voice, ‘well, all right then. I really don’t know how I’m going to square it though. You know what Serious Crimes are like once they take an interest in A14 – they’re better budgeted, better equipped, better manned, and they’ve got their own folk upstairs to put the pressure on.’

‘You just find a way of holding that mob off Mardy for twenty-four hours,’ I said, ‘I don’t care what happens to anyone else. Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.’

‘Yes, but the trouble with you,’ said the voice, ‘is that no one else does.’

‘I have to solve these things my own way.’

‘Somebody told me you’ve got the press on it.’

‘One man,’ I said. ‘You know what it is, I feed them and they feed me.’

‘I suppose it’s that bloody man Cryer from the
Recorder
again, is it?’

‘He’s all right,’ I said.

‘You might as well go ahead and marry him, have done with it.’

‘You’re right in a way,’ I said. ‘I always protect my own, there aren’t many of them. So look after your end of it, but keep clear of Mardy.’

‘Why don’t you and I change jobs?’ said the voice.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, and rang off.

I went over to the tough-looking little armchair that stood in a corner of the room. It held its plastic elbows out to me like a wrestler, and the only way I could think of to get a submission was to sit down on it hard and have a drink. But I had barely had a chance to mix it when Cryer rang.

‘We were just talking about you,’ I said, ‘where are you ringing from?’

‘London, I had to go and see Angela.’

‘You think of Angela when you think of Mardy, OK?’

‘I had a talk with Mardy before I left, I ought to tell you.’

‘I should fucking well think so,’ I said, ‘I told you expressly not to do that. Well, anyway, how was he?’

‘Not good. All absent in his mind.’

‘You be careful how you play this,’ I said, ‘you meddling bastard, don’t you come on hard-boiled with me. What did you find out about Mrs Mardy?’

‘Nothing,’ said Cryer. ‘Where is she?’

‘I’m not going to tell you. Not now.’

‘This story’s beginning to make a noise where I work. The
sort of noise we’re paid to make.’

‘I don’t care,’ I said, ‘nor do you. As long as I’m in charge of this case you’re the only reporter on it, and that’s for past favours and favours to come. But play it my way.’

‘She’s dead, this woman, isn’t she?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she’s dead.’

‘And the husband killed her.’

‘Yes, but it was no ordinary murder.’

‘I’ve got to know more than that.’

‘And you will, but not before tonight. Look, don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I keep telling you, no one’s going to get in ahead of you. But when you do get the facts, Tom, now you help me, damn you. Let’s have a little pity from the fourth estate – it won’t do your story any harm. I’ll tell you this much; yes, I’m going to do Mardy, I have to, but I’m equally going to make certain that he doesn’t do the full bitter trudge in a court of law.’

‘What are you asking me to do?’

‘Be kind, basically.’

‘I’ve got an editor who isn’t kind.’

‘Fix him,’ I said. ‘You can if you’ve a mind to. What you and he both want is to get in with it first and you will, but you’ll do it on my terms. Are you coming back down to Thornhill now?’

‘Of course.’

‘Good,’ I said, ‘because I might be going to need you.’

‘All right,’ he said, ‘but what about these other people? I’ve heard a rumour there’s even a local police officer involved down there.’

‘Where the hell do you people get these rumours from?’ I said.

‘All sorts of people talk,’ he said. ‘They’ve got tongues in their heads, haven’t they? Our job is just to listen.’

‘I told you earlier to fuck off, Tom,’ I said, ‘you didn’t listen. I told you to leave Mardy alone – and you’ve interviewed him.’

‘You trying to protect Mardy or what?’

‘That’s what I’m doing,’ I said. ‘The rest of the mob, you can go mad on that lot, but I will not have Mardy destroyed, either by us or by you, do you understand? Now will you play this by my rules or won’t you, it’s as simple as that.’

‘OK.’

‘Then get down here fast,’ I said, ‘and stand by, I’m on my own here. Tonight, if you and that editor of yours can hold yourselves in that long, it’ll all be finished, and you can start printing.’

‘OK, OK,’ he said. ‘Done.’

I thought, ringing off, that Cryer had hardened up a lot since the McGruder days. But don’t we all get harder?

(Mardy had said to me: ‘Perhaps Marianne and I would have looked tawdry with the dawn now, the candles pale, exhausted; we would have gone out, looking old, to shiver on the terrace, waiting for next summer with the dead beside us. We would only have comforted ourselves with our music and memories, waiting for sunrise.

‘Slowly I am feeling my way towards the other line.’

‘What line is that?’ I said, and he answered: ‘It’s death, for the other night when I was cold and alone I pulled my blanket over me and half dreamed that I was in the small back bar of the pub behind the hospital where I trained. We were the same nine at our table; we used to drink beer and gossip. Somebody, Ian Richards, I think, cracked a joke and I said that’s really very funny but as I spoke I fell from my place, faint, knowing I had gone, falling against the stomach of a big man who was standing nearby, and I heard them say, he’s ill, but I was on the floor. It was too late; sound, voices, light had faded to nothing.