The Devil's Home on Leave (Factory 2) (8 page)

It was different when I was a young police officer, before I married. I remember central London as it was then, before things got so bad: people, tough in adversity, with nothing to offer but the music in them which they played on mouth-organs at street corners or else they just sang.

I felt like a berk amongst them at first, in my uniform with its bright buttons and the helmet over my nose. Still, I began to understand them after a while. I watched them on day-shift and on night-shift, playing to the walls of their inner silence. Most coppers, unfortunately, don’t listen; it would make some of them more human if they did.

The office crowds would be leaving for home still, when I came on in the evening, or else making for the pubs. Men trailed their rags, like the sound of an old man sleeping, towards St Martin-in-the-Fields, feeling for money for a bottle; they would sit out and
drink it in the dusk, sitting on the benches in Trafalgar Square. Some were mad, some pretended they were, others wished they were. Once your youth has raced away from you, you can see it better when you look back, closing your eyes at night; I still smell the warm summer chestnut leaves in the parks, the hot dust of the pavements on my beat, and the fumes of traffic halted at the top of Sloane Street or Hyde Park – people going to parties by cab moving through Eaton Square in the evening, the windows down at the back, the girls in expensive dresses and the young men, their eyes as red as their overdrafts, toasting passers-by with champagne as they were transported to Belgrave Square. Then there were the street accidents – later the violence in the same warm evenings south of the river, the big bottle-and-razor fights between mods and rockers; maybe the first time you ever had to show courage was walking between them, alone, to stop it. My first inspector was maimed like that, a broken bottle across his right eye; Clarkie, we called him, a straight bloke.

There used to be a man we called Blind Jamie who stood at the corner of Villiers Street in the Strand. Some of them carry white sticks to help trade along, but he really was blind; you could see where he’d been hit in the face by shrapnel at Monte Cassino. When he turned his face up out of the dark to the street lamps, something he did at times to see if his sight might he returning, you could see the shrapnel they couldn’t get out shining in his cheeks. He wore a cap to cover his bruised features and sold the fruit his mates brought up for him from Essex and arranged on his barrow: ‘It’s amazing, you know,’ he said to me one evening, ‘the way the birds trample on me, literally trample on me for my apples. All the girlies love my apples – best apples in London, I always say; I get all my regulars queuing for them.’

Well, he’s dead now, worsted by a block of matter inside him; he died in Guy’s Hospital in the public ward, turned on his side towards the wall.

Life seems poorer without men like him, with their courage; I
admire courage and self-respect. I’ve known others freeze to death in the winter; I’ve found them, covered with snow in a doorway, mistaken for a sack of coke. I’ve seen them also, clean and ready for a chat in the queue, waiting outside the office in Beechcroft Road to collect their giro from the DHSS.

I got up and tried to read, to shake off my memories and dreams. I picked up a book. But it made no difference; the book lasted far too long, like a government, and was full of stuff that could have been left out – I suppose to make it thicker-looking and more impressive on the shelves.

I dropped it on the floor. I gave up the idea of sleep. Instead I got a can of cold beer out of the fridge and drank it slowly, thinking and looking at the wall. It was ten past three. I thought about my man in the army. I thought about him all the time, no matter what else I was thinking of. I hadn’t an address for him yet, but I was sure I’d turn him up all right. I tried hard, but I couldn’t think of anyone else who would fit the plastic bags so well. I didn’t really need any more files, though I had had some up during the day. I could see all the known villains, big, small, or mediocre; in the dead of night like this I could parade them all before my eyes.
Parade
. It always came back to the army. My instinct, like a compass, kept swinging round to find north no matter what I did, no matter how I argued it. Finally I got up, trod on my beer can and put it in the garbage; then I went and looked out of the window onto Acacia Circus. It was what passes for peaceful in 1984 – that is, quietly threatening. I found myself thinking of when I was small. The second war was just over and my father, who had left the Fire Service to join the Engineers, used to hum a tune that was popular then:

It marked your childhood, the war, even though I was only four when it ended. My mother told me I was born during an air raid; it brought me on, she said, the bombs did. I used to listen to them both as they recalled goodbyes in uniform, a hurried kiss in the blackout, the tail-lamp of a taxi disappearing in the dark, a hand waving from a troopship, and then the telegrams (‘deeply regret … you’ll be glad to know … died like a man’).

When the telegram for his brother came my father, who was on leave, said: ‘Christ, what else could he have died like?’

My father had become part of a bomb disposal squad for landmines; quite unexpected people did remarkable things then.

Long ago one December night, when I was on the beat in Euston Road with another officer, a woman came up to me in the fog with the glow of King’s Cross station behind her and said: ‘Could you help me, please?’

‘What’s the matter?’ I said. She was crying. ‘Look, cheer up.’

‘No, I’m afraid I can’t,’ she said, ‘my heart’s broken.’ I looked at her and her expression struck me like ice in the stomach.

‘His name’s Clive Masters,’ she said, ‘he’s shot himself. We’d had a few words and I went out to calm down, and when I came back he’d shot himself. It’s just opposite – forty, Argyle Crescent, would you go? I’m afraid I can’t. I’m afraid my life’s over now.’

‘Come on, it’s never that bad.’

‘Don’t you really understand?’ she said.

The city roared softly in the night.

My partner and I had separated, but he came up presently and I said look after her while I go and see. The house was all bedsitters and the landlord and I went to the room. The gas fire there was going out because there was no more money in the meter. There was the unmade bed, and there was the body on it – a small body it looked too, with the blood on the bedding and the white unshaven face and a silly two-two pistol on the floor. Well, we got the usual mob round to the place – lab, fingerprints, a detective-inspector.
At last a squad car came and I was going to see her into it and carry on with my duty when she looked at me with eyes that I shall always remember, they were so dark blue, and said: ‘You’ll come with me, won’t you?’ and the inspector said yes, it was OK. Going back she told me she had wanted to be an actress and I said well, you will be, but she said no, not now, where are we going? I said to the station for a cup of tea, and then we’ll put you to bed there. In a cell? she said and I said no, in the duty room. Whereupon she was silent with me in the back except that once she cried out oh, Clive, come back, come back! Then she looked at me again and said, what am I going to do now? What would you do now, if you were me? Well, it was no good, I was young, I didn’t know and couldn’t tell her, and I still don’t know what I would have done if I’d been her. Then we got back to Tottenham Court Road and she went away with the inspector to make a statement and I didn’t see her any more.

‘Not all fun in this job, is it, sonny?’ said the duty sergeant. ‘Well, piss off then, you’ve got a report to make on it; I want it at nine sharp.’

I heard her cry from one of the interrogation rooms: ‘Oh, when may I love somebody, please?’

‘But that’s from Noël Coward!’ said a young copper who was standing nearby. ‘
Private Lives
, that is. Fancy!’

‘What do you think you’re in?’ said the duty sergeant. ‘Amateur dramatics or something?’

‘That’s right!’ said the young constable eagerly. ‘I’m playing the lead in
The Doll’s House
over at Finsbury Park Saturday night at the Grand; it’s going to run right over Christmas. Why don’t you come and bring the missis, sarge? Tickets are only five bob.’ He babbled happily on: ‘Now that’s really sad,
The Doll’s House
. I play the husband, see, and I just can’t believe it at the end there, when the girl says she’s going to leave me – I’ve been blind and uncaring all my life, see?’

‘That don’t surprise me at all,’ the sergeant said.

I went down the room to where I couldn’t hear them so well, but he followed me and went on: ‘Yes, a real tragedy, the lines just speak themselves. Norwegian feller wrote it, geezer called Ibsen. That’s right, Norwegian – same as that maniac we caught up north that time who interfered with all those young men and buried them in his garden.’

I was very angry and stood with my back to him thinking of some lines I remembered from Coward myself: ‘I’ll leave you never, love you for ever.’

Private Lives
.

For all his supposedly outstanding service record, this man I was getting interested in had killed Corporal Dick Brownlow in a cowardly and brutal manner, garrotting him at two in the morning as he came out of the latrines at Saighton Camp, Chester, where both men were on an unarmed combat course. It was established at the trial that the two had never got on and that my man, while acting-sergeant because most of the course were on weekend leave, had gone out of his way to fuck Brownlow about, because it had been asserted by witnesses that Brownlow had suggested more than once that my bloke was a murdering queer. Various witnesses had proposed a grudge fight. But my man hadn’t waited for that; he killed Brownlow stone dead in the dark, took the body to his car, drove to a canal and dumped the body in it. When the SIB came down my bloke denied any involvement, po-faced, even after it became obvious that, apart from motive, he was the only soldier who couldn’t establish his whereabouts for two in the morning. Brownlow was done with a piece of piano wire, and a witness from another unit stated that he had seen the suspect taking one out of a piano that was being broken up by four defaulters with a pair of cutters. Two of Brownlow’s hairs were also found in the boot of the suspect’s car. When they arrested him he just shrugged and went away with them in handcuffs, politely smiling.

Yes, he conducted his own defence, speaking always in a quiet, restrained manner with a trace of Ulster in his speech.

He was as guilty as a man can be. The jury unanimously found him guilty and the judge said: ‘Because of your military record I shall mitigate the sentence I would have imposed and send you to
prison for ten years, with the recommendation that you do every day of it. Take him down.’

I went out to the news-stand opposite the Factory and bought a
Recorder
. Cryer had done his work well. On page one the headline,
Plastic Bag Nightmare
, marched across the sheet with the stiff majesty of tombstones. It came hard through the print that what Cryer had seen with me in that warehouse had hit him where he lived.

I dialled Cryer. ‘They pleased with you over there?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t sound too happy.’

‘I’ve been having bad dreams.’

‘Yes, the bags were enough to give anyone a jolt,’ I said, ‘no matter how hard-boiled he thinks he is.’

‘Was that meant to be funny?’

‘No, I was talking about myself. Now listen. If anyone contacts you over the story, you let me know straight away. It doesn’t matter if it sounds far out.’

‘Yes, sure. Got any ideas?’

‘Just one so far. It’s guesswork, but I’ve got to start somewhere.’

‘Anything on the humane killer angle?’

‘How the hell did you hear about that?’

‘I’ve got a friend in the lab.’

‘You pick useful friends,’ I said. ‘OK, well, keep in touch.’

Next I rang the internal number upstairs.

‘Where have you been, for Christ’s sake?’ said the voice. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you all morning.’

‘I was in bed asleep for once.’

‘Well, what the hell did you take that baby wonder from
Boy’s Own Paper
up there with you for?’

‘Because I wanted someone who was prepared to think for himself,’ I said, ‘not some world-weary hack. I took Cryer up with me because I got the idea he could think, print what he thought,
and make a good job of the story. All of which he did.’

‘You’d no right whatever to let them offer a five thousand pound reward for information without clearing it with me first - none at all! The whole thing was a carve-up thanks to you. When television and all the rest of the mob got round there everyone had gone, no spokesman, not even a copper on the door – the whole place shut up like a clam and not a plastic bag to be seen!’

‘I know,’ I said, ‘I fixed it like that. I just wanted the one story in the one big circulation daily that every villain reads. That way the hot tip, if there is one, will go to the one man who covered the bags with me. I got the story out where I wanted it out, the way I wanted it out.’

‘I don’t care what you wanted!’

‘Well, that makes it tricky,’ I said, ‘because it’s my case unless you want to take me off it.’

‘Don’t talk rubbish, sergeant. What I mean is, a man like Bowman wouldn’t have handled it like that at all.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘well, our methods are quite different.’

‘You’ve made a completely obscure murder look like a national flap.’

‘Who knows but it might turn out to be one?’ I said. ‘I know the public are pretty jaded, but this is nasty enough to make even them sit up. Besides, slickly done like this was, it could be connected to something else – a well-buried connection. It’s unlikely, but it does happen. And another thing – no murder’s completely obscure. Luckily. Otherwise, we’d never solve any of them.’