The Devil's Home on Leave (Factory 2) (6 page)

I finished emptying the bags and laid the contents out. We both bent over what there was. There wasn’t much, so it didn’t tell us much. The blind flesh on the fingers was no help, just as Bowman had said it wouldn’t be. The knuckles and finger ends had popped out through the skin.

‘How will you ever find out who he was?’ Cryer said. He doubled up suddenly; I saw he was going to vomit by the grey sweat on his face.

‘Do it anywhere in the corner there,’ I said.

He was horribly sick. When it was over he said: ‘Sorry. Had a big lunch today, early.’

‘With the mob from the news-desk?’

‘No, with my girl. Today’s her twenty-second birthday.’

I looked at what lay on the floor, the smashed legs that I had fitted to the severed knees, the elbows, wrists, shoulder-blades and hands. I said: ‘Well, mind you look after her.’

‘I do my best,’ he said, ‘but women are so confident.’

‘They are till something happens to them.’

‘I have to do my job,’ he said, ‘that’s the trouble. I can’t be everywhere. I won’t let her get on a tube train by herself now, not after six at night. I lecture her till she starts yelling at me, but it’s her I’m thinking of.’

‘You lecture her,’ I said. ‘She might end up being glad of it.’

He got out a packet of Kleenex and wiped his face. Now that he had reacted, he was calmer over what was on the floor. He repeated: ‘Do you think you will find out who he was?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘How?’

‘It’s simpler than you might think,’ I said, ‘the murderer’s going to give me a hand. In fact, he’s started to already. The fact he’s left no trace, that’s a trace in itself. Second, he wasn’t alone; there were certainly at least two of them. Thirdly, the job was so well done that I’m certain it was done for money, and that probably means that the victim wasn’t just anybody. Therefore, I start looking for anybody who was somebody and who’s gone missing. They soon show up – by their absence, if you see what I mean.’

‘Are you suggesting it was villains?’

‘You bet I am,’ I said. ‘Look at it. The only other possibility is that it was a nut, but I don’t buy it – it feels like a contract to me.
And when it comes to a contract, who are among the first people to get hit?’

‘A grass?’

‘Dead right,’ I said. ‘My guess at the moment is that this wretched individual was most likely a grass, and a big-time one, too. There aren’t that many of them – that’s why, if I’m correct, I’m certain to find out who he was. And the moment I know that, and as soon as I find out what the weapon was that killed him, I shall start getting an idea of who to get after – though, mind, I’ve got the shadow of an idea already.’

‘What can I print?’ he said.

‘After what you’ve just been through? Anything you like.’

‘You could get in bother, giving me a free hand like that.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and I could get out of it too. I run my cases my way – that’s one great advantage of working on your own. And if the folk upstairs don’t like it they can fire me. They probably would’ve already, except that I’m not that easy to replace.’

‘Well, I want to feature it.’

‘Go on,’ I said, ‘I’m all for it. Print what you like; who knows, you might turn up something. Someone, somewhere, several people, they know whose body this is – and knowledge, that’s money, and aren’t we all into that? So offer a reward – say in the region of five long ones. But go easy on the contract angle; I’m not that far on yet – this is all theory so far. By the way,’ I added, ‘do you happen to know anything of what’s going on over at the ministry of defence?’

We were walking downstairs by this time. There was a uniformed copper posted in the street, and I asked him to get through for a vehicle to collect what was upstairs and take it to the morgue.

‘Well,’ said Cryer, ‘there’s some almighty mess stewing away there somewhere. We keep trying to get an interview – nothing doing.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘but let me know anything you pick up.’

I looked around me in the street. After what I had been looking at, it was good to be outdoors again. It was a clear evening, with a red cloud like something mad out of a stripper’s hat drifting above the Thames. ‘That looks a fair old pub on the corner opposite,’ I said to Cryer, ‘let’s go and have a drink there. You’ve certainly earned one.’

He said he didn’t feel like it, but I insisted, and he looked better when we had settled down in there. It was clean, it was normal, and the real wooden tables smelled of polish; it was one of those pubs you just come across where straightforward people are having a drink after a day’s work. It made me feel better just to sit and watch them play darts. It made me feel as if I had been let out of hell.

I got him a large scotch and watched while he drank it. ‘How are you feeling now?’

‘I’m fine again. But I’ve got to admit, I’ve never seen anything like that before.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘I’m four years out of university,’ said Cryer. ‘It’s time I grew up.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’m just going to phone the paper.’

‘Take your time,’ I said. ‘Ease down.’

He was gone a while. When he came back he said: ‘Well, they’ve cleared the front page for it.’

‘I should think so,’ I said. ‘Well done.’

‘Why well done? It’s a story any paper would put on page one.’

‘Yes, but you had to get it,’ I said. ‘That’s why well done.’

‘That’s the job, getting it.’

‘How long have you been with the
Recorder
?’

‘Eighteen months.’

‘If you’re still the way you are now in five years’ time,’ I said, ‘you might go a long way. You stood up well to what we saw just now; I can think of older men who would have run for it, freaked out.’

‘I can’t do that,’ he said seriously. ‘Angela and I need the money too badly and there are three million folk on the dole. I’m from
the Midlands and I’m a working-class lad – not that I insist on that. But it’s like my dad says – us gets in there and us keeps trying.’

‘Drink up,’ I said. ‘Fancy a nibble? It says they do a snack.’

‘It’s too soon, I’d spew it up.’

‘Put the worst of it out of your mind,’ I said, ‘and drink, it’ll do you good. I’ll get us a lift back.’

‘I live right out at Wembley.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said, ‘I know a minicab firm that owes me so many favours, a fiver’d take you to the moon and all the way back to your front door.’

I rang for the car and as we were leaving Cryer said to me: ‘You know that business you were on about before, what you were asking about, the defence ministry?’

‘Yes, I’ve been asked to keep an eye out.’

‘Well, I don’t know, but do you remember reading not long ago that we expelled a whole mob of Russians from their place over there at Highgate?’

‘That trade delegation of theirs?’

‘That’s the place. Well, it’s only a rumour, and don’t quote me because I could get in diabolical bother, and besides, it’s probably not even true.’ He hesitated. ‘I’m sticking my neck out here. I asked a few questions and told my boss on the paper, and he told me to forget the answers.’

‘I’ll be careful,’ I said. ‘Don’t think I’ll name you anywhere, I won’t.’

‘Well,’ said Cryer, ‘here goes then, for what it’s worth. It seems possible that whatever’s stewing over at the ministry and the expulsion of these Soviets may be connected. It’s one of those rumours that just won’t keep quiet in Fleet Street, and you know what that can mean.’

I did know what it could mean. But I didn’t much like the idea of what it was I didn’t know.

There used to be dignity in life; I used to see it all round me when I was young. But now it’s gone. People no longer care about each other the way they used to – not the way my old man used to tell me life was when he worked in the Fire Service during the war and the bombing. Then, people who didn’t even know each other would go down into the flattened buildings after a raid and shovel to get at the people buried down there as if the victims were their brothers. Even after the war there was still some trust left; it ran on nearly into the Sixties. But now it’s all sorry, squire, don’t want to know.

It was the afternoon of Hitler’s birthday, April 20th, 1979, that Edie pushed our little girl under the bus; and when I went to bed that night at my horrible flat at Earlsfield after leaving Cryer I saw her, as I often do in my dreams, her flushed face flying backwards from me in a great wind as I try to catch her, and then I woke and thought I saw her like a flame on the end of my bed.

I’ve heard that abroad people believe the British are cold; it isn’t true. No bullet can deliver you into an agony like lost love; yet neither can the great power of innocence be put out. Such sweetness can be mishandled and ignored – but Dahlia always gets through when she wants me, calling: ‘Daddy? Daddy? Are you all right, Daddy?’

Great living Christ!

Yes, there used to be dignity in life, and I would die if I thought that would bring it back. I often wonder what people think a police officer is and how he thinks, or whether they believe he thinks at all. They just see the helmet, or the warrant card, and trouble. But we take risks. Some of us go into places because we
must, whatever’s waiting there. I would give my life to have my little girl back again, but all I can do in the anticlimax that life is without her is to do what I believe to be right in the face of evil. So old-fashioned! But I have only dreams and memories of my daughter to fall back on now – dreams where I see her like a bird, flying free and happy in the face of my trouble.

Yes, I used to pick her up and sing to her before I had to leave and report for duty – at Old Street, that was. But I never managed to protect and love her as I should have because I was too anxious for my career. So now I feel the arms of others round me in the place of her arms, and know that, because of my ambition, I went off to work that day and so let Edie kill Dahlia because I was too proud ever to admit to myself that I knew Edie was mad.

‘Have you got anything?’ I said. I was in the morgue.

‘Yes. It wasn’t easy, though.’

‘Police work never is,’ I said, ‘not if it’s done properly.’ I was talking to the snide young pathologist I usually got.

We were in the cold room with its tiled walls and smell of formaldehyde.

‘You really are an awkward bastard, aren’t you?’ he said.

‘I wouldn’t be any good if I wasn’t.’ I was still thinking how I used to pick Dahlia up and hold her in my left arm while I threw darts at the old cork board Edie and I used to have in the kitchen.

‘Another dart! Oh please, Daddy, please!’

She was the life I had made, and I felt her beside me now bright even in the face of her mother’s brooding intensity which never frightened her. I felt her with me here in the morgue; I found myself remembering, I don’t know why at that moment, how I used to take her to the football matches I played in those days, at weekends, leaving her with the other wives.

But the young doctor had lit a Gauloise: ‘We’ve found it was done with a humane killer,’ he said. ‘Unusual, that – not the sort of weapon you expect to find used on a person.’ He yawned; some of it was fatigue.

‘Well, the funny thing about murders is that they are unusual,’ I said. He made me angry, because there were times when I wondered why I bothered to clear up shit that always repeated itself, only to be faced with cynicism and remote-control emotion.

‘Calm down, sergeant.’

I barely heard him. My daughter was still in my mind. The window was open in the sitting room of our third-floor flat and
she was leaning out. I waved at her as I left for work that last time and she waved back and called out: ‘Don’t be long, Daddy! Come back quick! I love you!’

‘And then he was boiled,’ the doctor was saying. ‘Amazing.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it was thorough, wasn’t it?’

‘I just don’t understand you people,’ said the pathologist, ‘you’re all cold-blooded. To look at you mob, anyone’d think I was talking about the weather.’

‘You’re just as bad,’ I said.

‘That comes from seeing too much of it,’ he said bitterly.

‘Change your job.’

‘I’ll ignore that,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I suppose he was a criminal.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and he’s made mistakes. We all do it.’

He thought about that. Then he said: ‘As a matter of interest, can you make any sense of it yet?’

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘It’s early on and I’ve got some more checking to do. But it won’t be a long list, only a few names – perhaps fewer than that. The fact it was done with a humane killer’ll be a help.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it marks the man who did it,’ I said. ‘When you’re as deep into murder as I am, you come to realize that every crime is signed by the pettifogging care of the killer. The more careful he tries to be, often the easier it is to trip the bastard up.’

‘We try to take a humane view of murder these days.’

‘That’s good,’ I said, ‘I hope you concentrate on the victim, not the killer.’

He coughed.

There were two kinds of humane killer, I mused. There was the old-fashioned type where a thing like a nail was detonated by a small-calibre cartridge, usually a four-ten. But you don’t see many of them now. The new kind works with compressed air. It hardly makes a sound; you can buy one easily. No serial number, no record at all. You’ve just started up in the butchery trade, let’s say, and you’ve got your own cattle out in the country; you want to
slaughter your beasts yourself. Any wholesaler that supplies the trade – a high-class ironmonger even – will sell you what you want. No register to sign, no permit required, no one’s to know.

‘Still, he might as well have used a knife,’ the pathologist was saying.

‘Well, he might,’ I said, ‘but not on a contract. You don’t want any mess, do you, and you know what a knife death’s like. You’ve seen plenty of them; it’s like the day Father papered the parlour. Also, doctor, supposing you were mad – so mad that you enjoyed doing the job with a weapon that you had so carefully worked out to be untraceable in your weird little mind that it made you stick out as neatly as a sore thumb?’