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

And that’s one reason I’ve never got far in the police – I admire one or two of the folk I’m paid to catch.

Christ, I remember the day I got out of buttons. It was June and fine weather and I walked up Sloane Avenue to Chelsea nick, where I’d just been posted to the CID. I believed I was in love, too, with my beautiful great-chested Edie, and all the birds sang double for me in the London trees that day. I dashed up the pavement wondering how soon I was going to be promoted sergeant, and wanting to know where all the villains were; the folly of youth. I hummed and sang and did a hundred silent calculations on my pay for Edie and me; my prick tingled with desire to make a child with
her, and I would have gone mad, or laughed at anyone who had told me that Edie would murder our daughter.

But no one told me.

When I got back to my room at the Factory, Room 205, the phone was ringing. I picked it up and the voice said: ‘What are you on right now, Sergeant?’

‘I’ve just come off this Home Office course.’

‘That’s it, so you have,’ said the voice. ‘Did you learn anything?’

‘Nothing I didn’t know already.’

‘You are a very cheeky man, Sergeant,’ said the voice, ‘and so you thought you knew it all, better than the lecturer himself, did you?’

‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t be alive still if I didn’t know a good deal better than him.’ I added: ‘Have you been following police funerals at all lately? Ken Hales, for instance?’

‘Yes,’ said the voice, ‘I was there.’ There was a pause, which seemed to last a long time but couldn’t have, during which I stared at the sickly green walls of my office, the plastic tulips in a corner. It was February. It had been snowing up to two days ago and the heating, which was always either flat-out or not on, was right off. I watched the north-east wind fling the snow at the roofs opposite; the dirty flakes whipped off the slates with each gust and whirled greyly down into the street; blew into hurrying people’s faces.

‘There’s work for you,’ said the voice. ‘This one should fall straight into your lap. Anyway, it’s going to have to, I’ve no one else to put on it.’

Straight into my lap – I had never known them fall any other way. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Villains?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the voice. ‘But it isn’t London, you’re going to take a trip to Wiltshire.’

‘What sort of a death is it?’

‘We don’t know that it is a death yet.’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘A14 is—’

‘A14 is what I decide it is,’ said the voice. ‘It’s to do with a man called Mardy: his wife’s disappeared.’

‘What have the local police done?’

‘Trailed their arse, a case of duck’s disease.’

‘That’s very unusual,’ I said. ‘Who reported that she’d disappeared? The husband, of course?’

‘No,’ said the voice, ‘it wasn’t reported by anyone. That’s what’s unusual. Finally, local gossip reported it to the Chief Constable.’ The voice added restlessly: ‘I don’t know the details, that’s what you’re going to find out about – we’ve been asked to lend a hand. First it went over to Serious Crimes, but Chief Inspector Bowman reckoned that as it wasn’t a reported death it was nothing to do with him. Anyway, he’s got his hands full with this millionaire’s son who was found burned to death last Sunday night on Clapham Common, you’ve no doubt heard about it.’

Well of course I had.

‘All right,’ said the voice, ‘get over to Serious Crimes, check with Chief Inspector Bowman, he’ll give you the details.’ It added: ‘By the way, I do wish you and Bowman would try harder to get on together; I’ve had the backlash of the most frightful row you both had the other day.’

I said: ‘I know the one.’

‘It just won’t do,’ said the voice, ‘it apparently nearly developed into a pitched battle out in the street.’

‘People exaggerate,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t as bad as that, but I agree – we don’t see things the same way, he really hasn’t the brains for the work, just the ambition.’ I added: ‘And I seem to worry him.’

‘Unexplained Deaths and Serious Crimes are bound to have to work closely together,’ said the voice irritably. ‘And Bowman’s your superior officer by a long way; you’ve got to get on.’

I said: ‘I wonder if you could if you were in my place.’

‘That’s a ridiculous remark,’ said the voice.

‘I know it is,’ I said, ‘but it shouldn’t be.’

‘You could go further up the ladder yourself if you wanted to, but you will keep refusing promotion.’

‘If I accepted it,’ I said, ‘that wouldn’t solve anything, the problem in the service would still exist. Rivalry, jealousy, the struggle for recognition – the police is the same as any other organization in this country – but I’m only interested in bodies. By the way,’ I added, ‘it’s obvious who was responsible for the burned-out millionaire offspring – Bowman’s beating up every one in sight, but that’ll get him nowhere. I was talking to a grass the other night in the Quaker’s Head who told me that this boy’s tart, a little tits and bum job, you know, page three in the Sunday press and a face like a bank statement, did you know she’s got form for torture and that sonny’s father likes being dragged around the floor by his cock? I’ll bet you didn’t, and I’ll bet you none of you know how this grass found out about it. He was employed as a croupier in private baccarat games in the West End when he opened the wrong door one night in a Berkeley Square house and—’

‘It isn’t your case, Sergeant.’

‘No, all right,’ I said, ‘we’ll just let Chief Inspector Bowman take a long, slow lob at it and where does that get us?’

‘It gets you down to Wiltshire,’ said the voice, ‘and that’s all you need bother about. Go over and see Mr Bowman straight away, he’s waiting for you at the Yard, and watch your manners, will you, for Christ’s sake?’

‘I’ll watch my manners fine,’ I said, and we rang off.

(I dream for a moment in Room 205, thinking of my uncle’s letter that I have which he wrote before going off to die in ’44, ‘what a world, old boy, what a world’. He wrote it to my father and then he was gone – but not forgotten, anyway not by me. He foundered with the rest of the fresh blood on a brown mountainside, yet still in my breathless sleep I feel that I knew him, though I never knew him, but through his letters which he sent back from the front that I have I am still connected to him, ascending somehow to him.

My work tells me that our history is over, we are all over. I
know that in my work I am supposed to represent a future, but I find that impossible when I look back at the past. At Earlsfield I watch young people at weekends dancing down the street towards Acacia Road in jeans and sneakers; they run, smile and kiss, holding hands tightly and run off laughing while I turn back into the flat to hide in the darkness of my work and thought.

The other day, having been on an inquiry till three, I got up, unable to sleep, at twenty to five in the morning and went to the bathroom; in its wrinkled mirror I saw an anxious, unshaven man. Even naked, without my worn, boring clothes, I was still a low-ranking detective, nothing at all to write home about. Yet what did the dead look like at the front? Any different?

I understand that we all were, and are, part of a most ancient history; it is only meaningless to us because we are nothing but some of the threads. This frail, threadbare picture is all that’s left of us now; its strength was proud but badly led and went down – the most fertile field of all was the worst tilled.

On my days off I lie on my bed with grief for my lover and study my four small walls littered by my oversharp eye, in the paint, plaster and masonry, with the faces of my ancestors. I see the monotony of blood and nightmares and listen to the rain pattering grimly along the gutter.

Our church, my parents’ burial place, is for sale and shored up with baulks of timber, and on my visits I sense the dead waiting in the tall brambles behind the graves. Later I dream of them: they point greyly at me in the pitiless rain, begging me to act for them. Since I cannot they turn hopelessly away again into the hedge, shrunken inside rotten army waterproofs.

And how will we describe our own loss and pain to others, once we have passed to join a dead father by a dead fire in the darkness of a country that has gone?)

I walked out on to my balcony at Earlsfield that was too small to sit out on and pretended it was summer again; although it was only February, I believed I felt my blood ringing in a spring mist with
the sun just behind, and that I was listening to the song of a bird, young, and testing its brittle wings.

Then a truck moaned its way up the arterial road in second gear, covering the trees, everything in front of me, with diesel fumes.

I suddenly felt cold and went back indoors.

When I was small we were a united family, my mother and father, my elder sister Julie and I. We used to go out in the car on Sundays to Richmond Park, but then soon our people started to wear out, fall ill and die. My father had served in the second war and never really got over what he had seen in the Engineers; he started to get ill and die. My father liked to do everything himself, drive the car; when he got so bad that he couldn’t, nor split the kindling any more, my mother turned to us in despair and said I can’t drive or split wood, these are men’s jobs. Yet she was sick herself and died before he did. They sat opposite each other in the sitting-room, upright, each watching the other get worse and die; or he would gaze for hours, silently, at his favourite picture, the good reproduction of a country cottage with a rose-garden which he had hung above the fire. Then Julie and I saw our mother go, after years of watching my father sit and die.

As for Julie and me, I held her tight, comforting her as she wept into a cheese plant at their home after that last row she had with her husband Harry, the get-rich-quick lad in the sports-gear game.

I love my sister Julie, I used always to look forward to going down on my free days to the villa they had outside Oxford, and it was fine for a long time until one night I saw the look on her face and I said dear, you’re sick with worry, what is it, there’s like a frost on your face. Oh, she said to me, I must speak to someone – I’m sickened, yes, sickened by Harry now, he has a go at all the girls and he’s behind on the mortgage and he doesn’t care about me and the child any more; he spends his time at the clubs. Don’t worry about it, I said, that’s the kind of thing that happens sometimes in any marriage. Oh no, she said, this is different. He hit me the other
night for the first time in his life, and I’m really worried.

It was dreadful to see my sister so upset, we had always got on so tight and well, she was like my other self, we agreed so well, my only family, with her big arms and bustling skirt and cheerful face (hello, love, there you are at last, nice to see you, have a cup of tea, I’m making one, how are the criminals then?), and to see her now, pale and flat, pale as a candle flame in daytime. Gone her burly warmth that had been a haven, gone her sending Harry and me off to the Maid’s Head (Mind you’re not back late, you two, the shepherd’s pie’ll spoil, you know, it’ll be on the table at three). All that was left of that generous affection was her worry for her child and her spontaneous tears in my arms. And yet again, as with my own wife and daughter, I was at first so blind that I could not see that between Julie and Harry many little tragedies were constructing the great tragedy that wipes out all the pleasures of our memory – a joke, a kiss, a hard night out with friends, the sensation of loved bare flesh, music hummed in the dark, kicking a stone by lamplight down a road, all small things that make existence both exciting and possible.

The day she rang me and said help me, Harry’s in jail, I’m alone with the child, I went down to their flat at Oxford to find she had got worse alone, sitting rocking in a chair in her tweed overcoat with the baby on her knees with a blanket round it – the kettle and the pots she had taken pride in burned out and black and Julie herself much too small and neat now as the dead look.

I see no justice in it pissing down on the innocent under any circumstances, but it’s much worse when it’s your own blood, and I went in with their key I had and softly took the child from her and lit the fire and put the puzzled baby in the warmth, then took Julie by the wrists, pulling her up to take her by the waist as if we were lovers and said to her it’s all right, dear, it’ll be all right, as long as there’s the two of us still you’ll never go down, I’ll make sure. I said to her, even if you weren’t my sister, don’t you remember what you did for me when Dahlia died and how if you, and a couple of friends at work, hadn’t picked me up when you
did I believe I’d have shot myself, don’t you remember, Julie dear? And now it’s my turn to play.

But she only smiled and said she was afraid that people get ill and die and I said no, but she said, remember Father, and I said, as if I could forget, and she said think of it, dear, a draper who defused mines. He was a part of old Britain, I said, and we can be proud of him, Julie, and she said, I know we can, and I said yes, because I can think of nothing more terrifying than unscrewing the cap off one of those, but Father did it. She drew herself up then and began to look like her old self again and I said listen, I’ve got money in the bank. You keep it there, she said, and I said no, don’t be a fool, Julie, it’s for you and the child, I’m a man on my own, I don’t need it, take everything you want. No, it wouldn’t be right, she said, and I said listen, I’m your brother, aren’t I, whereupon she gave me such a beautiful look that I felt stung to the heart and she said do you remember how we used to play together on Sundays out at Richmond Park, and I said, of course I do. So then she looked at me very earnestly and said, dear, remember those times.

It was difficult, but I got her to take five hundred pounds at last to tide her over and she said, well, it’ll be for the child, but I said, for God’s sake, Julie, you’re all I’ve got, you’re my sister, and she said, veiling her eyes the way some women do, I want to repay it, would you like it if I came over to Earlsfield with the child and made house for you?

But I said no, Harry’ll only draw three and do eighteen months, if that, the jails are crammed. You’ll stick with him, won’t you, and she said, yes, Harry’s a fool sometimes but I love him, besides, there’s the child to think of and I said, that’s it, we’re none of us perfect. After the case, when he’d only drawn eighteen months, she said, I know it’s thanks to you that he’s drawn so little and I said, I know the arresting officer and did a deal with him on another case. I don’t think he’ll do it again, he’s not really dishonest, he just got desperate, out of his depth and she said, I may have been to blame too, I made him overspend – but if you knew the neighbours on this estate, how they talk. Let them talk, I said, and
get a sore throat from it. When he was arrested, she said, the day they came and took him away, when I was alone in the house afterwards, for a time I wanted to kill the child and die. You’d never do that, I said. You let me know if you get depressed; you just draw on me like I drew on you and Harry when Edie and Dahlia happened. Oh I’m all right now, she said, I’ve got over it, but it was the shock at the time, and the shame. Would you go and see Harry? Yes of course, I said, if he’d like it. Oh he would, she said. He told me when I went to see him the other day. I know he wants to thank you; he’ll send you a visiting order. She paused and said, you know what would be nice? When Harry’s back, perhaps we could go over to Richmond Park one day, the three of us and the child, like we used to. We could take a picnic, it would be good for us. Yes, I said, good idea, we’ll do it one day.