The Devil's Home on Leave (Factory 2) (17 page)

‘This feller was asking for it when he said I couldn’t get it up in the sack,’ said McGruder, ‘I took that very seriously. Also he thought he was a hard man. He didn’t know me – thought he could put me down. So we went out to fight somewhere quiet, a place where it was just bush and snakes, and I told him no, I can’t fight you, I don’t want my pretty face all marked up, you’re too hard for me. So when he’d finished laughing at me and was turning away, I took out this two-five automatic I’d nicked off a dead golly and I just said to him
I’ll kiss you where you’ve never been kissed before, darling
and gave it him straight up the arsehole. What a mess.’ He added: ‘Then I shot him in the head. I don’t like it, people being cheeky with me, it’s no good.’

‘Yes, I get the message,’ I said. ‘Did you have any bother over it?’

‘Bother?’ He burst out laughing. ‘Don’t be stupid – there was a war on. I just told them back at Command that a golly patrol had got him – I shot him with a golly gun.’

‘Well, it’s about time I got you, Billy,’ I said, ‘missing witness or not. I don’t like what happened to Smitty – no, I don’t appreciate that at all, particularly as it’s partly my fault, I was too eager. Anyway, I’ll be in a position to feel your collar soon.’

He shook his head in the calm, obstinate way he had. ‘If you ever want to take me, copper, you’ll have to do it the hard way.’

‘It won’t be that hard at all,’ I said, ‘not once I’m ready for you, you’ll see. My people wanted to pull you in on sus right now; but I said no, I’d prefer to wait until I could do you for murder.’

‘You’ll wait a long time.’

‘No, Billy,’ I said. I paused. ‘In fact, I’ve changed my mind. I think it would be nice if you and I took a trip over to the Factory straight away to see if we can’t crack you down there – make it all official. You could make a statement and sign it—’

He shook his head again. ‘I told you no,’ he said evenly, staring me in the eyes. He added: ‘And I’ll tell you you don’t know how lucky you are, because I’d really like to kill you. Yes, that’s what I’d like to do.’ His lips trembled with desire. ‘Badly.’

‘Oh, come on,’ I said, ‘you’d drown in the shit if you did that, you’d have every copper in Britain after you and not a leg to stand on. No, that wouldn’t be clever of you, Billy, and don’t you just love to be clever? I’ll tell you what would be clever, though,’ I added. ‘Why not be a big boy? Why not confess you topped Hadrill? Just to start off with. We might do a deal. We’ll leave Edwardes for the time being. Come on, you’ll feel a load better once you’ve done it. Easier in yourself.’

But he wasn’t listening. ‘I don’t need anything to do you with,’ he said dreamily. Then he held up his hands with their hammer thumbs and screamed: ‘These! That’s all I need, just these!’

I turned my back on him and walked over to the door, though it took some doing. He was making a strange noise like an animal caught in a trap. He took no notice when I opened the door to leave. ‘I’ll be back again as usual,’ I said softly, ‘but you won’t know when, Billy.’

‘Hawes is ready for you,’ said the chief screw. ‘He’s over in the punishment block, I’ll show you the way.’

‘Good,’ said Bowman with relish, ‘let’s get over there.’

We went quickly, because the one thing Bowman couldn’t stand, ironically, was the inside of a nick. ‘Putting ’em in here’s enough for me, I hate having to come into this fucking awful place myself.’

It was pissing with rain as we crossed the exercise yard. He didn’t like the rain either, and by the time we got inside the punishment block he was in a state of barely suppressed fury. Detective-Sergeant Rupt was with us, one of Bowman’s mob. Rupt was heavy, with a reputation for liking trouble. What made him more dangerous, he had a very quick cold mind to go with his build.

‘Nothing rough to start with,’ said Bowman as we approached Hawes’s cell, ‘anyway, not unless I think it’s necessary.’ He added: ‘Which I well might.’

‘Do we do him one by one,’ said Rupt, ‘or three-handed?’

‘I’ll kick off,’ said Bowman, ‘and then we’ll play it by ear.’ I thought this quite comic because Bowman is tone-deaf.

Hawes stood up when we entered, then we all found somewhere to sit – the three of us on the bed, Hawes on a wooden chair, and the WPC who had arrived with a tape recorder on another chair at a table. Everyone was silent while the WPC checked her machine and then recorded the time, place, date of the interview and the names of those present; that made the tape official in court. She was a hard-looking woman in her thirties with about as much pity in her face as an empty plate.

Hawes sat looking at us in his prison gear – blue and white striped shirt, grey wool trousers and denim jacket. His appearance had deteriorated since I had seen him. Perhaps he was getting fewer perks from the kitchen; perhaps he was more worried, too.

Bowman looked hard at Hawes; the expression in his eyes was cold. He was a chief inspector, he was ambitious and confident, and the whole lot showed. He was well dressed, well fed, well housed; Bowman could go anywhere, any time, do anything, do anyone. He nodded impatiently at the WPC and she switched her set on. Bowman said to Hawes in a let’s-get-this-over voice: ‘You realize you are not obliged to say anything, but anything you do say will be taken down and may be used in evidence. Do you understand?’

Hawes said: ‘Yes.’ He looked as if he knew what was coming.

Bowman said to the WPC: ‘Switch off.’ When she had he said to Hawes: ‘Now listen, lover, and listen hard. This is the bit that doesn’t figure on any tape. You can play this one of two ways; the one I strongly recommend to you is the one where you tell us off the record every fucking thing you know about this Hadrill business, including everything that happened up at that York factory which didn’t come out at your trial. You play square with us, Pat, and who knows, you might do yourself some good. If not, and this’ll equally be off the record, well, I’m wearing my old clothes, and Sergeant Rupt here, he’s in the battering business as well. The other sergeant on the left here, he’s easier tempered, but the thing with him is, he just don’t like a killer; in fact he hates the bastards. Well, that’s it. Now we’ll just wait a minute while you make up your mind.’

Silence fell. It was very quiet that day in the punishment block; I still remember the ringing silence in that row of unoccupied cells. When Bowman had stopped speaking it got even quieter during those moments that can never be measured in time until Hawes, knowing he was beaten, broke the silence and began to talk – slowly at first, until he hit his stride.

I was interviewing Klara McGruder in her Stoke Newington flat. It was in a state of painful squalor. Through the kitchen doorway I saw piles of dead bottles; part of her unmade bed showed opposite and the floor beside it was littered with dog-ends. She talked unendingly in a deep, blurred voice, and the smell of garbage in the place wouldn’t keep quiet either. On the lino-covered table between us a half-eaten plate of sardines wallowed in their oil; an empty whisky bottle towered above them.

Outside it was raining bitterly across a barren park where the grass had been trudged away by the aimless feet of the unemployed until the ground was just mud. I got up and went to look out through the rain. Below me a man spread his rags to show his chest as if it were a really fine day. His red lips gaped open inside his curly beard; the mouth closed only when it encountered the neck of the bottle that he kept picking up from the bench beside him. Rain ran over him, sliding down his ribs, subtle as a blackmailer.

Behind me Klara McGruder shifted on her battered couch.

‘OK,’ I said, still at the window. ‘Let’s go over it again. Your parents were Yugoslav. You were born in Paris. But you’re not a French national.’

‘I became British when I married that bastard.’

‘You wouldn’t have got it now,’ I said, ‘the British Nationality Act, 1981, would have put paid to that.’

‘Who cares anyway?’ she said. ‘Drunks don’t need passports. The only way they want to go is backwards, and there isn’t a passport for there.’ She started to daydream. ‘When I was a child we used to go out into the countryside round Paris at weekends. Les Andelys, I liked that best. Do you know Les Andelys?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ I said. ‘The few times I’ve been abroad, it’s only been to unpleasant countries.’

‘It was great in the summer.’ Her English wasn’t good. ‘You could smell the grass – God, it was something, after Belleville. I used to chew a stem and dream of what I’d be when I grew up. And this is it!’ she screamed. ‘Look at it! This shithole! This, and social security!’ She looked through me as if I wasn’t there. ‘Mum and Dad would be off somewhere nearby, screwing; they always did it in the country. But I used to lie on my back in another world, listening to the river, smelling the grass, dreaming.’ She started to cry.

I looked at the wreckage he had made of her and it was one more point in my book against Billy. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got to put these questions to you. First, how did you meet your husband?’

‘In Paris. We met one night in a bar by the Austerlitz station. All right, I was on the game. We got friendly.
Friendly?
’ She spat on the floor. ‘With
him
? With that bastard devil?’

‘You think of him as a devil?’

‘I did after the start. When he began beating me up.’ She was silent. ‘It’s no good,’ she said suddenly, ‘I’ve got to have a drink. Just thinking about it. You having one?’

‘No thanks.’ She disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a tumbler of neat scotch. She drank some, gagging over it. ‘Billy McGruder? Christ, I must have been out of my mind. He tortured me, too,’ she added. ‘Cigarette ends on my hands and face. Red-hot needles, big ones, four inches long.’

‘Yes, he’s into needles,’ I said, thinking of Wetherby. ‘What was he doing in Paris when you met him?’

‘He told me he was a paratroop sergeant with the British army and that he was on leave.’

‘The kind of leave he was on,’ I said, ‘was being released after doing seven years for murder.’

‘I know that now,’ she said, ‘but too late. It’s always too late for me.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Are you joking?’ she shouted. ‘Look at me! I’m thirty-three, I can’t keep off the bottle, I’m finished, through, kaput.’

‘No children?’

‘I lost two through him. I miscarried with the first after a beating he gave me. He made me abort the other.’

‘What a smashing bloke. Does he know you live here?’

‘What?’ she whispered. ‘Christ, no, he’d kill me if he knew where I was.’ Fear stole over her face like an old carpet-slipper. ‘He always told me.’ She pushed back her hair and shook it out in an attempt to be a woman again; the hair might once have been gold. She drank the rest of her whisky at a gulp, looked at me with half-cut steadiness and said: ‘I know he did Jack Hadrill.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘It’s got the devil’s mark all over it. Christ, even I can read a newspaper, watch the telly. The humane killer? The plastic bags? That’s Billy all right. Ah, he was always neat, the bastard.’

‘You should have contacted us. Why didn’t you?’

‘I was too afraid. You don’t know what he’s like with a woman. But always neat, even when he came into you for a screw.’

‘Perfunctory?’

‘I don’t know what that means. I don’t know long English words. But if you mean he’d rather wank then the answer’s yes.’ She burst into frightening laughter. ‘And to think he married me because I talked him into it!’ Her face creased into what looked like merriment until you saw the expression that went with it. ‘I thought I was in love with him! With
him
!’

‘Why didn’t you leave him? Right back at the time when he started hurting you?’

‘You don’t leave a man like Billy,’ she said sombrely. She shuddered. ‘He leaves you. You’ve no will of your own if you’re living with him; that’s the first thing he takes off you. After any money you’ve got. He’s mean. And he left me. Often, and for a long time.’

‘When he went off to an army?’

‘That’s right. He said it was business. And then just as suddenly he’d be back. In the night. Like that. Any time. He’d suddenly be there in the room, with that cold smile he had.’

‘What did you do with yourself while he was away?’

A look crossed her face – the kind that always told me when there was a lie coming. ‘Nothing. I just tried to get him out of my mind.’

‘With alcohol?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Nothing more?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I don’t believe you,’ I said. ‘You’re lying to me, and I know why; it’s because you’re afraid. But you’ve no need to lie to me, Mrs McGruder, it’s the other way round. You’ve got to tell me the truth, because that way, by holding nothing back, you might tell me something that’ll help me nail McGruder and put him away.’ I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. ‘All right then,’ I said quietly, ‘OK, there was a man now, wasn’t there, while Billy was away?’

‘Well, he was a lousy lover. Give a woman any pleasure? Him? Never.’

‘Did Billy know about it?’

‘I hope to Christ not,’ she said. ‘But sooner or later he finds out about everything. He might know, and just be waiting till he finds me, or till it suits him. Then I’ll suffer. Battery cables. Terminals on my breasts and on my you know what. Needles. Fags. Fists too, of course. Everything he learned on interrogation courses in the army. Christ, I’m sick with terror just knowing he’s around – can’t you arrest him? You must be able to do the bastard for something.’

‘No, I can’t,’ I said, ‘not yet.’

‘When will you be able to?’

‘Perhaps soon,’ I said, ‘perhaps not. But the more you can tell me the sooner it’ll be. Where did you live with him?’

‘At a place we had over in Queenstown Road.’

‘All right, Klara,’ I said. ‘Now, who was the other man?’ I had the electric feeling I was onto something, but I spoke patiently, easily. She was already drunk. There was no point trying to rush her.