I Was Dora Suarez (25 page)

Anxious, restless for a reason he couldn’t name, he sped – he always moved very quickly – around the room and checked that the door that led onto the black staircase, still choked with the rubbish left after the fire, was well blocked. He couldn’t lock the door as he would have liked to because there was no lock and no key. He had already checked all the outdoors while the light lasted to find the source of the warning message that his instinct brought him, but the area was a mass of high buildings festooned with chimneys; any enemy could find a vantage point and watch him. He had to be so careful – the simplest precautions were always the best; he had learned that in his childhood. It was the only memory he had of it – when he used to piss the bed, after the first few beatings from the captain, wet or shine, he slept on the floor with the end of his penis in the neck of a lemonade bottle. As long as he was first up in the dormitory of forty he could empty the night’s result down the jacks.

His nameless anxiety increasing, the killer now put on a pair of racing-cycling gloves and began hurrying, flitting about in the room, its darkness relieved only by the faint, general glow of the city, cleaning away every place in the room where he might have left fingerprints. He pissed once into the rusty old bucket the other end of the workshop from where he slept. The movement made him groan with agony; he had to noodle and massage his penis with a fierce gentleness until somehow the water could finally pass.

He could be quickly packed if he had to be. He would have to leave his training gear behind him; it was too unwieldy to take and
besides would hamper him if he was in a rush. It was a pity, because he had got it just the way he wanted it and it was really well run in. Still, it could be replaced at any breaker’s yard, or even a council rubbish dump.

Stevenson and I parked well downhill from the take-away on the side of the street where, according to the large-scale map we had, we couldn’t possibly be seen from Spavento’s building at all, getting out of the car which was automatically a good thing because the street was calmish now that it was well dark, and so the less movement there was around, the better. Cryer saw us arriving from the entrance of the little bar-restaurant and made a sign, but seeing that the place inside behind him was packed with folk, I made a negative sign at him with my forefinger and then waved at him to cross the street our side.

When Cryer joined us, I said: ‘We can’t possibly talk in there.’

‘Where, then?’

‘Under this lamp post why not?’ I said. ‘It’ll do fine.’

When we were there, Stevenson said to Cryer: ‘What the hell is going on up there?’

Cryer held out a big envelope to us and said: ‘This, Mike threw the film down into the street and here are the prints.’

‘Before I start,’ said Stevenson, drawing the blowups out of the envelope, ‘am I supposed to go into a state of shock over these?’

‘How do I know?’ Cryer said. ‘All I can tell you is that I’m a married man and that I did; in fact, I’m still in it.’

‘That’s because you’re not a copper,’ said Stevenson. He divided the stack of photographs in two and passed on half to me.

‘Go easy with them,’ Cryer said.

We started to look at the pictures and presently Stevenson said:
‘What does he think he’s doing? Is he an acrobat cycling on one wheel or something?’

Cryer looked over his shoulder and said: ‘He isn’t properly mounted yet.’

I said: ‘He’s mounted with the ones I’ve got here.’

Stevenson looked over my shoulder at the pictures I had and said: ‘Holy Christ.’

I said: ‘The scroll of wire that it had to go through was lovingly made, wasn’t it?’

Cryer said: ‘But what’s the shape of that wire?’

‘Can’t you see it’s the shape of a vagina,’ I said. ‘The penis is locked into the far end of the wire and so stretched into the semblance of an erection, and the man on the tyreless wheel rolls backwards and forwards, keeping himself balanced with his hands on the floor, as you can see here, as if in the act of intercourse, and the process has to continue until he comes, and that could take hours.’

‘Good for the muscles,’ said Stevenson.

‘All except one,’ I said.

‘Why that big band across his stomach?’ said Stevenson.

‘To stop the wheel rim from biting into him,’ I said.

‘It’s insane,’ said Cryer.

‘Of course it is,’ I said. ‘Pain is inflicted by those who have no idea what it means,’ I said, ‘because they inflict pain on themselves. A man, a butterfly – it’s all the same to a torturer. Violence replaces love with the psychopath. Or, better still, violence is love with them. The psychopath has no means of knowing what he’s doing. Otherwise,’ I added, ‘he’s perfectly normal – drives a car, goes to work, even marries sometimes. It works fine for a while, kiddies and all, until something explodes, and then we’re called, don’t I know.’

Stevenson said: ‘I don’t believe these pictures.’

‘There are others,’ I said.

‘You can see we can’t print these,’ said Cryer. ‘Half our readers would have a heart attack, and the other half would switch papers – we’d be broke in a week.’

‘Yes, I know,’ I said, ‘the press can’t afford to roll the carpet back too far.’ I added: ‘I told you it wouldn’t be a big story.’

‘Oh, it’s big all right,’ said Cryer. ‘Only it’s too big.’

‘Well, I’m not standing here all night,’ I said. ‘Let’s stop wasting time.’ I said to Cryer: ‘Show us the way up to that roof of yours; I want to have a look at him. Your boy up there, has he got a night-sight camera?’

‘Of course.’

I said: ‘Then let’s get there. No chance of his seeing us?’

‘None,’ said Cryer, ‘even in daytime. We go up the fire escape at the back of the block opposite: the roof’s the same height as Spavento’s floor.’

‘OK,’ I said, ‘away we go.’ We started walking over there through the rain.

Cryer said: ‘Getting him out of there’s going to be dangerous.’

‘If he doesn’t feel like coming with us,’ said Stevenson, ‘yes, very.’

I said: ‘Well, then, it’s a good thing we had a good look at Tom’s photographs here, particularly the one which shows him loading the Quickhammer, isn’t it?’ Cryer said: ‘All right now, through this gate and up that path, then round the back of the building and to the right.’

I said: ‘And no torches, no lights at all.’

Indirectly, from an angle beside the window, standing in an intense draught which grew from the night wind, the killer had come back to stand again and stare down at the Golf which was his wings of a dove; but it was growing steadily less visible in the sparse streetlights of College Hill and the massing dark. He was all packed, and had a growing desire to go down with his Adidas bag, take the car and drive; its keys tinkled in his hand – they were the escape from his feeling that he was shut in and being watched. He felt driven to move; the impulse to move was beginning to drive him like steam behind a piston, the gauge steadily rising. He had bandaged himself up roughly between his legs. True, he had had to leave legacies of himself behind in the place, the assorted dishes on
the floor with their ancient stains, the wheel – he couldn’t take the risk of going out into the street laden down with all that, and anyway he was a man who travelled light. And yet his instinct urged him above all not to move – not to open his door and go out into the street, whatever he did.

A peculiar lassitude, a sadness, began to take charge of him now as he stood with his face leaning against the corner of masonry by the window, and a growing certainty that he had stolen the car for nothing; some voice told him that he would never get the chance to use it. Lost between counterstorms of rage and fear, he bellowed aloud at this invading anguish which was quite new to him; he had never before been forced into conscious knowledge of his own hopelessness. It was a condition of complete interior absence, the emptiness of collapse which, although he had known it fleetingly after he had been in action, he had never known settle in him like a dark, flapping, sharp-beaked bird before as it was doing now, or torture him as his scattered periods of sleep had done, or as his filthy dreams did. This motionless, seemingly permanent pain that had suddenly kicked its way into him – new in that for the first time he was aware of it – opened him up as if he were nothing but a long deserted, rotten front door, and moved in on him, a squatting black void that had moved in on him to stay. He was completely unprepared for it, coming for him as it did from a quarter and in a way to which he was fully vulnerable.

The worst part of what he was just starting to go through was that it seemed to him that the bird was exactly his own shape and was trying to burst it. He could feel it crawling in him, trying to exercise its great wings inside him. It precisely filled him; it filled him exactly as an egg fills its shell. Yet it was also his converse. Although it was as invisible as he was invisible to himself, it was as much at its ease inside him as he was in pain. It pecked deftly about in his interior when it felt its feeding time had come, just as it pleased, and he was sure it was beginning to pass its first stools inside him. They were stools of himself; the bird was banqueting on his husky, attractive body and then shitting in him, hopping
slowly around inside him, coughing up rotting morsels of himself that it couldn’t yet digest, or else storing them away in another place inside him with its beak for evaluation later. He felt that the presence inside him of this great black bird of absence meant that he by contrast was on the way out, screwed, fucked, finished, and that he was condemned to be pecked at slowly and eaten forever by this succubus, feeding greatly, as and when it felt inclined, delicately or voraciously, on those most delicate parts of himself, which, up to this moment, only he himself had felt entitled to destroy. For the first time in his thirty-eight years of life it occurred to him whether his own death might not be preferable to the death of others if his only future was going to consist of being rotten prey until he did die.

He wanted to act; but for the first time the gale of action roared through him as though he were a rotted sail which it blew to tatters, leaving him listing and beached above a sullen reddish brown tide; he had already, in the first few minutes of his new state, lost too much of his strength and violence to what was now inside him. Hopelessly, he pulled the shreds of his cock out and tried to knead it, thrash it, stretch, force, excite it into some semblance of an erection, staring with a rapt, glassy expression of exaltation up at the blackened cement of the ceiling. After what he had been doing to it all day, it was streaming with blood; there was nothing left of it for him to get hold of, so that in the end, groaning, he smacked himself there on it in his frustration, crying, whimpering and drivelling with rage, with one of his youthful little racing shoes whose spiked heel went straight into the thick black mat of his hair there.

Then, with his two bands still round his waist, naked, he pushed his training machine back out into the room again and got onto it with a weariness that was being rigidly observed.

We watched him through the lens of the photographer’s camera.

‘How are we going to get him out?’ Stevenson said.

I said: ‘I’ll get him out.’

Cryer was saying: ‘He’s getting back on his wheel again.’

The photographer said: ‘Christ, look at him ride, look, there’s blood going down all over the floor.’ He took a lot of film. ‘Nobody’s ever going to believe this,’ he muttered, ‘if it weren’t for the film.’

‘Christ, his cock,’ said Cryer, ‘there can’t be anything left of it.’

‘See for yourself through the lens,’ said the photographer, ‘there isn’t.’

We all watched Spavento by turns. He moved slowly on the wheel, backwards and forwards, propelling the wheel with his hands along the floor and balancing himself with his muscular legs. Every time his prick declined, part of it bulged through the wire scroll and was forced to brush harder and harder against the revolving spokes.

Cryer said ‘It will take me three weeks before I can face Angela and the kid again after this.’

‘You should have gone in for literary criticism,’ Stevenson said, ‘not crime reporting.’

The photographer said: ‘I’m sorry for the poor cunt.’

I said: ‘Don’t be. We reckon he’s responsible for the deaths of Suarez and Carstairs, also for the deaths of twelve or thirteen other people. He has to be nailed and he’s going to be. You’re looking at someone in hell; you’re looking at the truth that the British public never want to see in print. The public want just the grimy outline, not the intimate revolting details.’

‘All right then,’ said Stevenson, ‘so what do we do?’

I said: ‘We’re going to start by sending the press home.’

Cryer said: ‘You can’t do that to me. Not now.’

I said: ‘Now look, Tom, don’t start. What I say goes. Now I’m sorry, but there it is. You won’t be out over it; I never let my mates down. You’re the only paper on the scene, you’ve got the pictures, you’ve lived the story, you print what your editor will let you print.’

‘What do I have to say so I can stay on?’

‘There are no words for the music,’ I said. ‘It’s not on.’

Stevenson said to him: ‘You heard the man.’

I said: ‘Let’s get back to street level.’

Cryer and his photographer got into their car, Cryer saying to me: ‘You’ve been a real bastard over this.’

I leaned in at his window and whispered: ‘I’m not. You’ll see later. I’ve got my reasons.’ I added: ‘I don’t know how to thank you for tracking Spavento down.’ I added: ‘I have special feelings over Suarez.’

‘What?’ The photographer laughed. ‘Over a dead girl?’

‘Shut your mouth,’ I whispered to him, ‘just shut it and make sure it stays that way.’ I said to Cryer: ‘I’ll ring you when this is over, Tom; then you and I and Angela can have that meal together.’

‘You’ll never come for it,’ he said. ‘You never do.’ He did a swift U-turn and I watched his car vanish left into the South Circular Road. I turned back to Stevenson, who was leaning with his back to the wall by the entrance to the block where Spavento was.