The Devil's Home on Leave (Factory 2) Read online

  I admit that with my attitude, it really is a good thing I’m just a sergeant. It certainly suits me being low down the ladder, and it’s a relief not being interested in promotion – that way I can stay on in A14 which is the lowest budgeted department in the police service, and what I like best about my work is that I can get on with it, as a rule, almost entirely on my own, without a load of keen idiots tripping all over my feet. Yes, I’m happy to work at Unexplained Deaths, though naturally I go through the motions of complaining about it just like everyone else.

  5

  On the morning of April 14th I was in Room 205 finishing my report on a suicide when Bowman came in. Except that I had a personal problem that I wanted to think about, I was not as sorry to see him as I usually am. I was bored with the report; they’re really just bureaucracy for the file. Any clerk could write them himself from my notes, and a computer in turn could do away with the clerk. But if you work for the State, you’ve always got to make room for the clerks. I also, as I often did in the morning, hated my room with its sickly green paint, its radiator that only worked full blast or not at all, its old police posters that no one renewed, and the plastic tulips I had bought now that Brenda, the WPC who used to bring me real ones sometimes and give me a look or two, had gone off and got married.

  I had a paper with me and was looking at the lead story which was to do with the defence minister (yet again) when Bowman arrived. He belched, parked his big behind on the edge of my desk, spread his fat thighs apart and farted.

  ‘Well, I’ve got one for you.’ He snorted into a paper handkerchief and wiped his nose.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Over at Rotherhithe; he’s stapled up in five Waitrose plastic bags. You can come down with me right now. I’m pushed for time, but I’ve just got enough to give you a lift and I’ve got a car waiting.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Nobody knows. Usual A14 stuff. All we know is, he was murdered.’

  ‘That’s deduction for you.’

  ‘Now don’t ride me,’ said Bowman. ‘Not today.’ He added: ‘Nor any day.’ He blew his nose again; the noise rocketed off the concrete walls.

  ‘You have a look at his jaws?’ I said. ‘His teeth?’

  ‘Couldn’t. The killer knocked them out and threw them away. Now then, don’t fuck me about, sergeant, I’ve got a big bank job on. It’ll be in all the linens.’

  ‘Your cases always are.’

  ‘Look,’ said Bowman, ‘just pick up your bra and brolly and let’s get over there.’

  ‘Your temper’s improving to the point of no return,’ I said, standing up. ‘You undone any of these bags yourself?’

  ‘Two,’ he said. He added sarcastically: ‘To see what was in them, you know.’

  ‘And what did you find first?’

  ‘His head. I told you his teeth were missing.’

  We went out through the main door of the Factory and got into the car. As we drove fast down Gower Street Bowman remarked: ‘Yes, this is a tasty one.’

  It wasn’t raining for once; there was some weak sunshine about, although cloud the colour of a bank manager’s suit was scudding over Waterloo Bridge.

  Bowman said: ‘The forensic mob have been over and looked at it and put everything back again for you to see. But they reckon it’s going to take the lab a while to get any real report out on it. All they can say right now is that it was a male, white, probably in his late forties.’

  ‘Why couldn’t they tell more than that?’ I said. ‘Like how he was killed, for instance?’

  ‘The killer didn’t seem to want to make things easy,’ said Bowman.

  ‘But the head, the trunk.’

  ‘It was all boiled,’ said Bowman, ‘and let’s go easy talking about it, shall we, especially in a moving car, it makes me want to throw up, and I’ve seen most things. That’s why there are no prints, the skin has been boiled off his fingers – he’s been altogether boiled, cooked up, see?’

  ‘No traces of blood around? Nothing spilled at all?’

  ‘No. What I think is, there was more than one individual involved, and that they killed him, bled him into something, boiled the blood away with the rest, butchered him and cooked him.’

  ‘No clothing? No object the victim had dropped? Nothing?’

  ‘Well, they didn’t find anything,’ said Bowman. ‘And of course no clothing. They must have stripped him, bundled his clothes up and destroyed all that later.’ He added: ‘They’re fucking cannibals, these people, the sick bastards.’

  ‘Methodical, though,’ I said. ‘Professional.’

  ‘Well, I agree it isn’t the work of a nut,’ said Bowman, ‘at least, not in the ordinary sense. Too neat, too careful – yes, OK, professional. Just the five bags of gear, grey, pinkish a little here and there.’ He thought for a moment and added: ‘You know, like pig’s trotters. Or veal.’

  ‘Smelling?’

  ‘No, not yet. Good point,’ he added grudgingly, ‘especially stapled up in plastic like that, you’d have thought it would’ve. Also, there was still a faint smell of cooking. So that’s why they think he was done in the warehouse, and in the last twelve to eighteen hours.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘particularly since the weather’s warm.’ I thought for a minute. ‘Well, I don’t know, early to say. But Rotherhithe, the professionalism, etcetera – it sounds like good old gangland again to me. Who reported it?’

  ‘The caretaker. He’s waiting for you. He found the bags when he was doing his rounds and prodded one. He didn’t kind of like the look of them somehow, so he called us in.’

  ‘That was discerning of him,’ I said. ‘Plenty of people these days would have just dumped them out with the garbage without even looking inside.’

  ‘That’s what the killer ought to have done, I reckon,’ said Bowman. ‘Why he left them sitting up there in an orderly row like that I do not know.’

  ‘Maybe whoever it was didn’t want to take the risk of carrying them out in case there was a stray squad car about and anyway, they probably thought they wouldn’t be found for weeks.’ I added: ‘Oh, so the bags were in an orderly row, were they?’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it’s a good thing the bags were left. If none of these people ever made mistakes our solution rate would look even worse than it does.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ said Bowman. We were stopped in heavy traffic. Bowman sat forward and said to the driver: ‘Don’t just sit in this like a berk, constable. Get your arse in first gear and put your siren on, that’s what the fucking thing’s for.’ The driver obeyed, his ears and the back of his neck turning a dull red.

  ‘When I think of the booming recruiting figures for the Met,’ I said, ‘I think of people like you, and how you deserve a medal for them.’

  ‘Now look,’ said Bowman furiously, ‘you may never rise above the rank of sergeant at A14, but you could always go back down to constable; I could fix it easy. I could put you back on the beat – how about Brixton?’

  ‘I might see you there if you don’t get your brains in straight from time to time,’ I said. ‘I know a cafe in Brixton Road where they do a plain copper a really nice egg and chips and a good pot of tea for a quid.’

  ‘Don’t take the piss,’ Bowman shouted, ‘they’re waiting for me over at that bank. If I’m late I’ll get a roasting from the Commissioner.’ He blew out through his lips with exasperation, looked at his watch and rubbed his fingers down his face. ‘I’ve got something else on besides this bank business.’

  ‘Yes, the bank sounds more like the Fraud Squad to me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bowman, ‘but Alfie Verlander over there can’t crack the man and that’s why he sent for me; Alfie and I are old mates.’

  I knew that, and a sinister pair they made, too, playing snooker together on Saturday nights. ‘What’s this other thing?’ I said.

  ‘You been reading about the Russians lately?’

  ‘I
’m always reading about the Russians,’ I said, ‘but I’m too busy ever to bother with them; I leave all that to the Branch.’

  ‘I can’t tell you everything,’ said Bowman, ‘except that this one really is dodgy.’

  ‘You’ll be telling me next that it’s to do with this commotion I read about over at the ministry of defence.’

  Bowman turned and poked me in the chest with a stubby finger. ‘You forget I spoke to you, sergeant, do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ I said, ‘I understand I’m just to let you know if I hear anything.’

  ‘You just might,’ he said. ‘Meantime, get on with your plastic bags.’ He added: ‘Christ, what a bleeding miracle; we’re here.’

  6

  Where I go, the ghosts go. I go where the evil is. I was walking across the street with Bowman. Six months ago I had my worst case to date. Serious Crimes was over-extended and I was helping Bowman out. I had to arrest Fred Paolacci in his council flat in Hanwell, dressed up in the blood of three women. First he had gone round to the next housing estate to see to his ex-wife because she wouldn’t let him screw her; he ripped her up the stomach with a butcher’s knife and stuck his cock in her entrails. Next he went round to his new bird, a black prostitute who wouldn’t marry him, and saw to her the same way. Then he went back to his wife’s place with the knife and waited until his ten-year-old daughter came in from school.

  ‘I don’t want you to see your mother the way she is just now,’ he explained to her as the child ran up the stairs with her satchel on her shoulder and calling to her mother – he made the point to me later how happy she looked, running up the stairs. Well, they went into the flat together, and then the kid got a look at her mother, one leg in a boot sticking out through the bedroom doorway and blood everywhere. The child started to scream, and when he couldn’t stop her he opened her up (‘but only a little way, not like the others’) and raped her.

  ‘I really came that time,’ he said, ‘the others was really just like wanking.’ He admitted everything, except raping his daughter, straight away. But after I had patiently proved it to him, the traces of his semen that had been found in the child’s body and the rest of it, he dropped the eager, honour-bright way he had been staring into my face while he answered my questions; his face went dark and he nodded and looked away and said: ‘Oh well, that’s it, then. Yes, I feel easier admitting it, really – it was out of order, that was.’ He added accurately: ‘Bloody women.’

  I got hold of a man who had seen him walking in the street out there that evening, covered in blood. His conversation with Fred was casual:

  ‘Hurt yourself, Fred?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘cut myself on a fucking knife, just going down to the doctor’s.’

  ‘OK, well, see you over at the Cricketers later for a pint.’

  The fact that Paolacci could coldly lie about what he had done made him fit to plead. My witness had never thought to come forward with what he had seen; I had to find him. ‘Well, I thought that was the end of it,’ he said indignantly, ‘once you’d got him. Lord, do I have to go to court? The wife and I are booked on this package holiday to Mallorca.’

  Some people.

  Attractive-looking bloke, Fred. Dark-haired, regular features, neat dresser. Italian father, British mother, thirty-eight, worked on the assembly line at Ford’s. None of his mates on the shop floor had a word to say against him.

  ‘Fred Paolacci? Lovely feller! Buy you a pint any day, lend you a few bob if you was short till the end of the week – I can’t believe it. You sure you haven’t got the wrong man?’

  The wrong man! I see him now as I saw him the day we were in the police van on our way to court, biting his nails to hide a sly dark smile, his eyes far off and vicious. On the way he asked me if I thought he would ever be forgiven.

  ‘Only by Lord Longford,’ I said. I added: ‘What do you mean by forgiveness, anyway? Where did you get a word like that, Fred?’

  He thought about it. ‘I don’t rightly know,’ he said in the end. ‘Can’t remember. Must’ve read it in the Mirror.’ As we took him away he looked back into his flat, leaning away from the cuffs and said: ‘One last look at my tools. The tools of a man who’s finished die with him. You can always tell a man who’s finished by looking at his spanners; spanners know when a man’s not coming back.’

  All the police do is remove the bodies from a scene; it isn’t our job to clean up. That’s down to the council or the incoming tenant; we’re too busy.

  Anyway, nobody did clean up; that was why, when two squatters, a girl and a feller, broke into the flat, the girl had a heart attack.

  ‘Teach the bastards to respect council property,’ Bowman said when I told him about it.

  7

  But I could really have done without the plastic bags just then. As I mentioned, I was distracted by a matter in my personal life, and I wanted time to reflect on it. The day before I had been to see my ex-wife at the place she has lived in for a long time now, and always will live. Going down there in the car I found myself, I don’t know why, remembering how, while we were courting, we went down to Petticoat Lane market one Sunday, and bought a decorated plate there.

  Edie always had to masturbate before she could make love. She used to do it in the bed, on her knees, her thighs straddled across my face while I watched her fingers racing away in the blonde fur of her vagina with patient, concentrated fury. Her eyes were far away, and she kept her lower lip trapped in her teeth so hard that, at her climax, she sometimes bit it till it bled. It turned me on hard. Yet I married the wrong woman. The woman I should have married went off with another man, who beat her up. I always knew there was something wrong with Edie really; but what got me about her was, she had the most beautiful breasts I have ever seen – calm, swollen and white, the nipples a dark red and stiff as castles.

  The place wasn’t guarded, not even by walls. It was for people who didn’t know any more where places meant, outside their minds, or how to get there; inside their minds it was always hell. I drove through the gates and across broad iron grids like the ones farmers and rich country people put down to keep their cattle in, went through a park and drove up to a big, old building in brick the colour of a burned-out fire. There was a half-tended lawn in front, and you wouldn’t believe you were only twelve miles from Hyde Park Corner. Birds sang in the beech and plane trees, the boughs tumbled in the wind just as if they surrounded an ordinary house; I could even hear a transistor going somewhere. On the lawn, old nurses who ought to have retired years ago walked about in their white caps and blue and scarlet cloaks because the breeze was cold, looking after their charges who hopped, skipped, screamed, ran or strolled under the yews and oaks making compulsive or vague gestures, looking down at the ground.

  I found Edie in the day room; it was dirty in there and the place smelled funny – well, it smelled of shit. When I came in and said hello, Edie, she snatched her hands out of the pockets of her tear-proof dress, looked at them and shouted at her hands: ‘Why are all the Royal Family in my garden? I thought I’d killed the whole lot of them with these!’

  ‘She’s been very aggressive all day,’ said the male nurse in charge, a new young one I didn’t know.

  ‘She senses when I’m coming somehow,’ I said, ‘and it makes her like that.’ I noticed how grey her hair was turning, though she was only thirty-six. It was matted and dirty as well, and I saw how she was reducing to skin and bone because they couldn’t get her to eat – not that that surprised me, the crap they gave them. As usual she was far too intense, racing along the tracks of her fantasies. She looked straight through us; human beings, to her, were as flat as the court cards in the pack she had let fall on the floor.

  ‘Yes, what are these kings doing here?’ she shouted. ‘How dare they be in my garden? Look at Lord Wentworth there! Bold as brass, if you please!’

  I followed her gaze to an old man sitting on a bench outside the barred window. He was playing
with his healthy, fresh pink cock and shouting grimly: ‘Tuppenny nuts! Tuppenny nuts!’ His face wore an expression that was tearing him to pieces.

  ‘Valuing the last of his spoons, I see,’ said Edie. ‘He won’t last long.’

  The male nurse turned to me and said: ‘She should have been sedated at three, but I didn’t want to put her down until after you’d been.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘thanks.’

  ‘I think she’s better off when she’s catatonic,’ said the nurse, ‘she seems to suffer less then, though how can you really tell?’ He walked away to deal with a male patient who was pissing against a wall on the far side of the room. Others sitting on wooden chairs sang, knitted their fingers together or sat stonily wrapped up in their world; some wept, some prayed, at grips with their terror, rocking to and fro.

  Edie’s hands shot out and wrenched at my coat pocket. ‘Give me a cigarette!’ she screamed. ‘Go on, give me one, or else I’ll set the whole fucking palace alight!’

  I stepped out of her way and said to distract her: ‘What colour are those spoons they have, Edie?’

  ‘Electro-plate,’ she said instantly, without looking at me. ‘No, that’s wrong – they’re base metal, repainted to look like gold; these people are so pretentious! Wentworth?’ Her raucous voice rose. ‘It’s not even an old title. Mind,’ she added, ‘I fancy him, the lucky bastard.’

  I noticed how bad her language had got; Edie used hardly ever to swear. I watched the terrible violence rising in her. In its way it was worse than the kind I spend my time dealing with; I felt horror, watching a human being I had known so intimately out of control, no longer human and racking herself to pieces. Oh God, why don’t they stop it, I thought, stop it? Why don’t they give her the last quarter twist and let her leave?

  ‘What else do you see, Edie?’ I said.

  ‘Further down the rose garden, there’s that greedy old Queen Mary talking to George the Third.’ She peered out of the barred window, her yellow face seamed with rage. ‘They’re talking about money,’ she snapped. ‘They’re related, of course, but only on the distaff side and that doesn’t count with royals, Mother says.’