The Devil's Home on Leave (Factory 2) (7 page)

‘All right – I’m following you.’

‘Yes, well then, that’s the signature of the man. And what a signature! It’s intended to be anonymous: yet it’s completely original! The man’s a villain, I’m sure of that. He’s a villain because he planned it all out. He planned it out because he was doing it for money. No money, no incentive. No incentive, no planning. But – you have to be mad to take a life for money. A psychopath. All right, then. Now, how many people would you say in this country filled that bill? He’s no raving nut like, say, Fred Paolacci; he doesn’t go strolling about on the manor with blood all over him. No, no. I bet you wouldn’t spot this little monster if he were standing next to you on a Circle Line train. White, neat and prissy – and very tough, very mad.’

The pathologist went to answer a bleeping phone. When he came back he said: ‘Multiple car smash on the A4 at Chiswick roundabout, there’ll be three to stay.’ He looked pointedly at the clock on the wall. ‘The ambulance is on its way.’

‘That makes a refreshing change,’ I said. ‘They’re usually not that speedy over picking up the dead.’

‘I’m going to be busy,’ said the pathologist. ‘I’m on my own, the chief’s on holiday. Two of them are completely jammed together like Siamese twins. Boy and a girl.’

‘They may have been in love.’

‘Well, they’ll always be together now,’ said the doctor. ‘I won’t get them apart. No need for me to detain you, sergeant. Anything else I get, I’ll let you have it.’

‘I’ll take to the streets again, then.’

‘Do that,’ he said coldly, ‘and try and keep better order in them, will you, it’ll save me a lot of work.’

I went up to Room 205. I hadn’t got a pen in there, as usual, so I looked round the open door of Room 206. Nobody was in, so I nicked the pen I saw on the desk. Then I sat down at my own desk and found some paper. I seldom use paper; the sheets I found were turning yellow at the edges. I sat staring at the opposite wall, which was decorated with an ancient poster showing a dog with its teeth bared and a slogan warning the public against rabies. After an hour I tried to write a single name down on my sheet of paper, only to find that my ballpoint had no ink. It didn’t matter. I rang downstairs to the basement and asked for a file.

When it came up I spent a long time gazing at an army photograph. The soldier’s uniform was beautifully pressed, with knife-edge creases down the sleeves; on the right arm you could see his stripes. After a little reading I understood why he wasn’t going to keep those. The face under the red beret stared at me calmly. Young. Peaceful-looking. Friendly.

Balls.

I read carefully through the file, turning back frequently to verify this or that. I began with the man’s birth – Coleraine, County Londonderry, 20 March 1950. No parents’ address, no next of kin. Joined the forces June 1968. Parachute regiment. There were copies of his army records – training, company commander’s assessment, commanding officer’s remarks. Defaulter’s sheet, crime sheet blank.

Until.

Until I liked it. The more I read, the better I liked it. Under the heading Previous Employment I saw that before joining the army he had worked casually in restaurants after coming to the
mainland, first as a butcher’s assistant in Birmingham, then later in various West Midlands restaurants as a cook.

Well, well! A butcher’s assistant! A cook!

Officers’ reports on his early performance in the army – excellent! Weapon training? A Captain Johnson had commented: ‘A first-class marksman.’ Lieutenant West: ‘As a parachutist, this NCO has a natural aptitude. Displays coolness under any conditions.’ But his company commander had noted: ‘Impressed as I am by his achievements, this soldier is nevertheless a troublemaker in 2 Company, making no effort to form friendships with the other men. He is uncommunicative and occasionally violent; I have had to discipline him more than once. Overall, I am dubious as to recommending him for promotion.’

And there was a psychiatrist’s report: ‘This man’s aggression is such as to render him unfit for promotion. I recommend further tests.’

But there was no time for that because the unit was posted to Oman, where there was some action. It was of course performance in action that impressed the army, and as a result of it my man soon made corporal. Always a loner, though. And look out you didn’t jostle him; he could go off like a bomb. The first really naughty entry in his records told how he had smashed a man in the face with the sharp edge of a mess-tin because he thought he had overheard a soldier passing a remark on his sexual prowess. Result: he was busted and drew nine months’ military prison at Shepton Mallet.

I knew Shepton. They were all staff-sergeants there, picked for brute force; they reckoned to break a man’s spirit down there in six months.

Not my man’s spirit, though. The army had decided to get rid of him when he came out with a dishonourable discharge, but it was in his records, how he had got them to take him back. He agreed to compensate the man he had injured (he had lost the sight of his left eye) out of his pay by royal warrant and then
besides, there was his service record. McGruder? Christ, he had done some pretty amazing things. Just a corporal, but if he was sent out to do a job on the enemy with four or five men he’d leave them well back – just use them to cover him
while he did everything that had to be done on his own
.

Those had been his own words at his court-martial, where he conducted his own defence, telling his ‘friend’, a lieutenant, to fuck off.

I looked at the sheets in front of me, and thought long and hard about that: ‘I did what had to be done on my own.’

Yes. And there was always, of course, much later, the case of Wetherby, the supergrass, unsolved and still on file. The choice of weapon used to murder him – a sailmaker’s needle through the eye. Another hit job, another unusual weapon.

Next I turned up the transcript of his other trial, where he had been convicted of murdering a fellow corporal, a man called Brownlow. It made horrible reading. I turned back again to study the killer’s photograph. Looking at the date on the back, I saw that it had been taken for records on the day he was arrested. Looking at the face, it seemed incredible, what he had done. That often struck me with psychopaths, the difference between the look on the face and what they had done. Take McGruder, now. He looked so calm. Quiet, neat, peaceable, friendly: buy you a drink, mate!

Wrong. He was tried in a civilian court, since the crime had been committed while the unit was based in the UK at a camp outside Chester. The facts weren’t in question. Fifteen witnesses testified to his absence at the time the killing was done, at two in the morning; the special investigation branch of the army could take its pick. Well, it had done that, and then turned McGruder over to us. So he stood up in court and conducted his own defence yet again – there were notes in with the transcript as to how he was calm, uninvolved, you would almost say.

That was what the court couldn’t swallow – the nonchalant bearing of the prisoner, also the cold-blooded element in the
killing itself – done, as it was, in the dark, deliberately, silently, from behind, and with a piano wire, a garrotting.

Ten years, he drew. But he did just seven – a model prisoner.

Then, when he got out, the records went blank.

He disappeared from Britain.

Well worth a visit, that one, I thought. Yes, really worth it, if the man was around.

Worth it on principle. He was still only an idea I had for the plastic bags, but it was his commando-style past, the fact he’d done bird for murder and for attempted murder and above all, his invariably unusual choice of weapon – that was what made his name stick with me. More than that, people like McGruder are worth paying a call on from time to time anyway, if they’re around. Casual, like. They’re the ones with the violence forever tight inside them. They’re the ones, well, you’d be just plain silly not to watch them.

I went back to Earlsfield, and in the night I had a rotten dream. A man the colour of death in a white suit came up to me in the West End out of a side street and offered me his love.

I had other problems in the dream. A man had been knocked down by a car at the bottom of Wardour Street and he was screaming where he lay on the tarmac in the night glare.

I had hired a taxi to drive myself; it was one of those old Beardmores they stopped using back in the Fifties. But I was going to cab it, take it to one of those big West End hotels where they scrape the shit off your voice as soon as you speak. The cab had a roof that folded down at the back like a child’s pram so that you could look at the park, and I’d rented it from some South London villains. I saw them laughing as I drove it away. The exhaust had gone, I didn’t like its clutch and it had helical gears. I didn’t like the sound of its motor either, and it was all wrong for the Eighties traffic around me. But I had to pick some strangers up at their hotel; for some reason I was desperate to pick them up. Well, I couldn’t find anywhere to park near their Piccadilly hotel, so I parked up on the rank west of Bond Street, and then started out on foot to look for these people among the night crowds eating hamburgers from the fast-food joints off Piccadilly Circus. It was hot and I was sweating; I could smell the meat frying and the spray-on onion. But I couldn’t get my bearings because, although I know the whole area like my hand, in the dream the streets kept fanning away into places I’d never seen before. In the end I got sick with anxiety over finding these people and I thought, shit, after all, I’d be better off back on wheels. So I ran back for my old banger where I’d left it, but a cabby told me as I went looking that the law
had towed it away and that there was a ton to pay in fines. And all the time it was raining, bloody raining. They say it’s bad luck to dream of rain; they say it foretells death when you dream of water.

Next I was going up the path of my parents’ house in Welling, like I used to when I was coming back from school, and there I saw my father leaning exhausted against the neighbour’s fence, favouring his left side. He still wore the suit he had died in and his trilby hat; the hat had fallen over one ear. He was completely rotten and dead. He smelled, and the places that death had eaten in his face showed through in a way that ought never to be seen. I said: ‘Father, dear God, whatever’s the matter? What are you doing here?’ He couldn’t answer at first, and I knew his disease was hurting him. ‘I’m lost,’ he said, ‘I’ve got lost somehow. It’s a bloody disease, this is.’ They sometimes take tumours out of them bigger than cricket balls; they took one like that out of him. So he searched my face earnestly for pity, and I went up to him on the path and took him in my arms and comforted him as best I could. But he just sighed and turned into a garden bird; then he put on his old golfing cap. Wings spread out through his coat and he fluttered up into the air, and as he went away I told him I would care for him for ever. But he couldn’t speak, only look tenderly at me from the other world. ‘Take the rain out of the names on our graves up at the church,’ he said gently, ‘with your forefinger; you’ll be sure to, won’t you, son?’ Other people watched us from chairs high up on a terrace; they too were dead.

I awoke and lay for a long while in the dark, thinking about what I had dreamed, remembering how my father had been a smalltime draper in Welling, and how my mother had had ideas of clothing us above the other children in the street and how he had been hard on my sister and me, moralizing and punishing us, though he nearly broke himself financially, what with his subscription to the golf club and sending us to grammar school.

And yet he hadn’t had a bad death in his own home, considering
the cancer that ate him away. I was up in Chelsea; I had just got onto the CID when he died. He was found by my sister who was looking after him; he was in his armchair in the sitting room, gazing at his favourite picture, a reproduction oil of a cottage garden that hung over the fireplace. The trouble being in his lungs, his heart had finished by collapsing, the doctor said; he had this terrible cough. Yet only the day before, my sister Julie said, he seemed to have almost mastered it and appeared much better reciting some of Shakespeare’s lines out of
Henry V
and standing up from his armchair in his shirt-tails to do it, and delivering himself of a vile great yellow stool on the cushion, of which he was ashamed and shouted for it to be taken away, of course. My sister and the doctor wanted him to go into hospital, but he wouldn’t: ‘I’ve paid for my home,’ he told her, ‘and I’ll die in it, my dear girl, as I’ve lived in it.’ He was very fond of Julie; she married a man in the sports gear business and they’ve done well, with a house out by Oxford on a mortgage. I like to go down there at times; we listen to music in the evenings and get on well together. She used to wash my father at the end and make his bed, and, in caring for him, looked at the penis which had made her for the first time; he used to take the end of it between his old fingers before he got too bad and squash it eagerly, winking at her; it was strange, she said to me after the funeral, how right to the end he still had the lean buttocks and big, heavy prick of a man in his prime. ‘Good-looking to the end,’ my sister said proudly after the funeral. ‘That’s what a wartime commission in the army did for him.’

As for my mother, she’d been dead already very many years – of boredom, I think, really.

No, I shouldn’t have married Edie. Through Dahlia’s end, through the loss of her reason, she dealt me a double blow that changed me into a man with a sparse emotional map: much harder, the peaceful places and the civilized building in me had gone, leaving just main roads to a few goals through bleak, mountainous country, roads carried frequently on precipitous lips that I don’t care to look over often.

Why can’t Edie die? And why do I have to be faced with these plastic bags just now? There are times, I don’t know if they come to everyone, when I feel that the future is beyond my strength: too much horror to deal with and no help to turn to. My flaw now is that I feel half a murderer myself because of what Edie did. No wonder I understand murder.