How the Dead Live (Factory 3) Read online

‘Kindly don’t anticipate me,’ said the lecturer. ‘When he is not on trigger, as I was saying, his condition becomes apparent through little manias which normal people find irritating in the extreme – for instance, his neatness and precision in banal matters. The way he arranges his pyjamas under his pillow. The sexual act to be performed just so. A glass to be washed twice at the sink, never once. The painstaking cleaning of a knife, the washing of underwear in a classically obsessive manner, silence in the presence of others and apartness, or else pedantic speeches that have no bearing on other conversation.’ He stopped. ‘Now this is the moment to put questions,’ he said, ‘do please ask some.’ Again no one did, and it was plain to me that the lecturer couldn’t understand why. Yet the answer was simple. We were all brooding on our own experience in this domain; we had plenty of it.

  ‘Very well,’ said the lecturer, gazing at us through his bifocals, ‘we’ve already seen on film earlier in this course how inadvisable it is to disturb the patient in his manic routines; this provokes stupefying outbursts which can be alarming even to the physician in charge.’

  Never mind the victim, I thought.

  ‘Yet leave the psychopath to run his own course,’ said the lecturer, ‘and he can be most difficult to spot.’

  I felt like saying that if he were easier to spot there would be less need either for us or for his lecture, but I managed to restrain myself. All the same I reflected on what I and everyone else in this lecture hall had undergone. (‘Now it’s all right, son, just put the knife down now, that’s right, give it to me, that’s it, take it easy, yes, it’s all right, you’ve topped her and I know you’re sorry, are you ready with that straitjacket, George? That’s it, just come on downstairs, why don’t you take my arm, we’re here to help you’ – knowing that if for no reason it went the other way …)

  The lecturer echoed my thinking: ‘The psychopath generally kills anyone who has seen him as he is.’

  ‘We’d almost do better not to spot him then, wouldn’t we?’ I said. ‘Then we’d all live to draw our pensions.’ I was fed up with him.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said the lecturer. ‘I’m afraid I don’t get the reference.’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ muttered the detective who had spoken before. I had placed him now; he worked in Camberwell, his name was Stevenson.

  ‘I’ll put it plainer,’ I said. ‘All you do is diagnose these people. We have to go in and nick them.’

  ‘I wonder if I could take your name?’ said the lecturer.

  ‘Certainly,’ I said, ‘if you feel you could replace me. And you’d feel the nip in your wages even if you could, which I doubt.’

  He gave me a grey look, the colour of the sea when the sun leaves it. ‘You’re a most insolent man,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not insolent,’ I said, ‘and I’ve got scrap-metal in me. Just cut the guff and try to be realistic.’

  The lecturer was a visiting professor in psychiatry and about my own age. He dealt in his specialized way with every top security prison and hospital in the country. I couldn’t stand the patronizing bastard, and I knew I wasn’t the only one in the room. He constantly gave evidence at murder trials as to the prisoner’s state but, unlike me, never seemed to find anything wrong with the system nor bother about the victim, only the killer. He had been called into more courtrooms than he could probably count, and it brought him a good income; evil apparently didn’t mark him at all. These lectures, of which this one was mercifully the last, was the anticlimax of a refresher course occasionally ordained by the Home Office for long-service detectives of whom I, as a sergeant at A14, was far and away the most junior in rank – in fact, I couldn’t think why I had ever been included in it.

  The lecturer was scooping up his notes. ‘Those of you,’ he proclaimed modestly without looking anywhere near me or Stevenson, ‘who want to know more on this subject can do no better than read my paper which appeared last August as a thickish volume, entitled Psychopaths and the World They Live In.’

  ‘What about the world we live in?’ said Stevenson.

  The lecturer immediately glanced at his gold watch and said: ‘I’m afraid I’ve got a lunch.’

  ‘I reckon he’s afraid of no such thing,’ I said, and we all went downstairs after him out into the street and had the pleasure of watching him being whirled away in a Mercedes whose chauffeur looked as if he had been hanging about for a long time.

  2

  I had to have lunch too, so I went to the Clipper pub in Little Titchfield Street where I knew a few people, mostly waiters, cab- and lorry-drivers; there I was free to sit daydreaming like any man, eating my banger, scooping up my peas with a knife and drinking beer.

  Only my daydreams weren’t pleasant. I wasn’t thinking of a naked woman with a big bum and no brains; nor of winning the pools or getting tickets for Saturday’s match. I was back at my Earlsfield flat the night before last, watching television. On it I had watched the funeral of a fellow officer; he had been killed in the dark and in the back. He hadn’t been putting wheel-clamps on anyone, but had been called out to help other officers save a life in a drunken shooting matter in a flat. He had cornered this artist, but then the triggers had been pulled and it had gone the other way for Ken.

  And so I bad-dreamed while I ate; he had joined the others. I’d already seen enough of them – Macintosh, Foden, Frank Ballard paralysed; now this boy Ken Hales was dead.

  The funeral was stiff with uniforms and held in the church of the Essex village, Sudbury not far, where Hales had grown up. What made the experience all the stranger for me was that I recognized so many of the faces in the congregation from times long before I ever joined Unexplained Deaths. My word, some of them looked grand now – there were chief inspectors, superintendents, even a commander among those who bore the coffin, and most of them were my junior in age. In the church everyone was motionless throughout the service, his cap on the pew in front of him while the priest intoned, Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother Kenneth here departed, and later, when they were round the raw clods of earth at the graveside: Earth to earth … ashes … dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection … Christ … who shall change our vile body unto his glorious body, according to his mighty working.

  But I could only remember the dead man as a promising three-quarter in police rugby matches – big, strong, young, a man you never would have thought could go down, a fair man too, a good detective and no brute. An item on the news – a risky career wound up, a widow in black with three kids huddled round her white-faced.

  I’ve known hard villains all right – a tiny handful of them are fun to be with, adventurers more; I don’t mean the morons, cowards and assassins. I remember one of them saying to me a week before he was shot down in Whitechapel while he was out on bail: I don’t see it matters a fuck whether you live thirty years or seventy, I’ve pulled a million’s worth of strokes and spent the lot on myself, women and clubs, and I regret nothing, darling. I said you know there are people after you, and he said yes and I know who they are too, and I don’t give a monkey’s. I’ll be thirty-six tomorrow, so why don’t we split a bottle? Two, I said, and ride hard, keep riding, the way you thieve you take real risks and you’re no killer, nor are you a grass.

  And that’s one reason I’ve never got far in the police – I admire one or two of the folk I’m paid to catch.

  Christ, I remember the day I got out of buttons. It was June and fine weather and I walked up Sloane Avenue to Chelsea nick, where I’d just been posted to the CID. I believed I was in love, too, with my beautiful great-chested Edie, and all the birds sang double for me in the London trees that day. I dashed up the pavement wondering how soon I was going to be promoted sergeant, and wanting to know where all the villains were; the folly of youth. I hummed and sang and did a hundred silent calculations on my pay for Edie and me; my prick tingled with desire to make a child with her, and I would have gone mad, or
laughed at anyone who had told me that Edie would murder our daughter.

  But no one told me.

  When I got back to my room at the Factory, Room 205, the phone was ringing. I picked it up and the voice said: ‘What are you on right now, Sergeant?’

  ‘I’ve just come off this Home Office course.’

  ‘That’s it, so you have,’ said the voice. ‘Did you learn anything?’

  ‘Nothing I didn’t know already.’

  ‘You are a very cheeky man, Sergeant,’ said the voice, ‘and so you thought you knew it all, better than the lecturer himself, did you?’

  ‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t be alive still if I didn’t know a good deal better than him.’ I added: ‘Have you been following police funerals at all lately? Ken Hales, for instance?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the voice, ‘I was there.’ There was a pause, which seemed to last a long time but couldn’t have, during which I stared at the sickly green walls of my office, the plastic tulips in a corner. It was February. It had been snowing up to two days ago and the heating, which was always either flat-out or not on, was right off. I watched the north-east wind fling the snow at the roofs opposite; the dirty flakes whipped off the slates with each gust and whirled greyly down into the street; blew into hurrying people’s faces.

  ‘There’s work for you,’ said the voice. ‘This one should fall straight into your lap. Anyway, it’s going to have to, I’ve no one else to put on it.’

  Straight into my lap – I had never known them fall any other way. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Villains?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the voice. ‘But it isn’t London, you’re going to take a trip to Wiltshire.’

  ‘What sort of a death is it?’

  ‘We don’t know that it is a death yet.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘A14 is—’

  ‘A14 is what I decide it is,’ said the voice. ‘It’s to do with a man called Mardy: his wife’s disappeared.’

  ‘What have the local police done?’

  ‘Trailed their arse, a case of duck’s disease.’

  ‘That’s very unusual,’ I said. ‘Who reported that she’d disappeared? The husband, of course?’

  ‘No,’ said the voice, ‘it wasn’t reported by anyone. That’s what’s unusual. Finally, local gossip reported it to the Chief Constable.’ The voice added restlessly: ‘I don’t know the details, that’s what you’re going to find out about – we’ve been asked to lend a hand. First it went over to Serious Crimes, but Chief Inspector Bowman reckoned that as it wasn’t a reported death it was nothing to do with him. Anyway, he’s got his hands full with this millionaire’s son who was found burned to death last Sunday night on Clapham Common, you’ve no doubt heard about it.’

  Well of course I had.

  ‘All right,’ said the voice, ‘get over to Serious Crimes, check with Chief Inspector Bowman, he’ll give you the details.’ It added: ‘By the way, I do wish you and Bowman would try harder to get on together; I’ve had the backlash of the most frightful row you both had the other day.’

  I said: ‘I know the one.’

  ‘It just won’t do,’ said the voice, ‘it apparently nearly developed into a pitched battle out in the street.’

  ‘People exaggerate,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t as bad as that, but I agree – we don’t see things the same way, he really hasn’t the brains for the work, just the ambition.’ I added: ‘And I seem to worry him.’

  ‘Unexplained Deaths and Serious Crimes are bound to have to work closely together,’ said the voice irritably. ‘And Bowman’s your superior officer by a long way; you’ve got to get on.’

  I said: ‘I wonder if you could if you were in my place.’

  ‘That’s a ridiculous remark,’ said the voice.

  ‘I know it is,’ I said, ‘but it shouldn’t be.’

  ‘You could go further up the ladder yourself if you wanted to, but you will keep refusing promotion.’

  ‘If I accepted it,’ I said, ‘that wouldn’t solve anything, the problem in the service would still exist. Rivalry, jealousy, the struggle for recognition – the police is the same as any other organization in this country – but I’m only interested in bodies. By the way,’ I added, ‘it’s obvious who was responsible for the burned-out millionaire offspring – Bowman’s beating up every one in sight, but that’ll get him nowhere. I was talking to a grass the other night in the Quaker’s Head who told me that this boy’s tart, a little tits and bum job, you know, page three in the Sunday press and a face like a bank statement, did you know she’s got form for torture and that sonny’s father likes being dragged around the floor by his cock? I’ll bet you didn’t, and I’ll bet you none of you know how this grass found out about it. He was employed as a croupier in private baccarat games in the West End when he opened the wrong door one night in a Berkeley Square house and—’

  ‘It isn’t your case, Sergeant.’

  ‘No, all right,’ I said, ‘we’ll just let Chief Inspector Bowman take a long, slow lob at it and where does that get us?’

  ‘It gets you down to Wiltshire,’ said the voice, ‘and that’s all you need bother about. Go over and see Mr Bowman straight away, he’s waiting for you at the Yard, and watch your manners, will you, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘I’ll watch my manners fine,’ I said, and we rang off.

  (I dream for a moment in Room 205, thinking of my uncle’s letter that I have which he wrote before going off to die in ’44, ‘what a world, old boy, what a world’. He wrote it to my father and then he was gone – but not forgotten, anyway not by me. He foundered with the rest of the fresh blood on a brown mountainside, yet still in my breathless sleep I feel that I knew him, though I never knew him, but through his letters which he sent back from the front that I have I am still connected to him, ascending somehow to him.

  My work tells me that our history is over, we are all over. I know that in my work I am supposed to represent a future, but I find that impossible when I look back at the past. At Earlsfield I watch young people at weekends dancing down the street towards Acacia Road in jeans and sneakers; they run, smile and kiss, holding hands tightly and run off laughing while I turn back into the flat to hide in the darkness of my work and thought.

  The other day, having been on an inquiry till three, I got up, unable to sleep, at twenty to five in the morning and went to the bathroom; in its wrinkled mirror I saw an anxious, unshaven man. Even naked, without my worn, boring clothes, I was still a low-ranking detective, nothing at all to write home about. Yet what did the dead look like at the front? Any different?

  I understand that we all were, and are, part of a most ancient history; it is only meaningless to us because we are nothing but some of the threads. This frail, threadbare picture is all that’s left of us now; its strength was proud but badly led and went down – the most fertile field of all was the worst tilled.

  On my days off I lie on my bed with grief for my lover and study my four small walls littered by my oversharp eye, in the paint, plaster and masonry, with the faces of my ancestors. I see the monotony of blood and nightmares and listen to the rain pattering grimly along the gutter.

  Our church, my parents’ burial place, is for sale and shored up with baulks of timber, and on my visits I sense the dead waiting in the tall brambles behind the graves. Later I dream of them: they point greyly at me in the pitiless rain, begging me to act for them. Since I cannot they turn hopelessly away again into the hedge, shrunken inside rotten army waterproofs.

  And how will we describe our own loss and pain to others, once we have passed to join a dead father by a dead fire in the darkness of a country that has gone?)

  I walked out on to my balcony at Earlsfield that was too small to sit out on and pretended it was summer again; although it was only February, I believed I felt my blood ringing in a spring mist with the sun just behind, and that I was listening to the song of a bird, young, and testing its brittle wings.

  Then a truck moaned
its way up the arterial road in second gear, covering the trees, everything in front of me, with diesel fumes.

  I suddenly felt cold and went back indoors.

  When I was small we were a united family, my mother and father, my elder sister Julie and I. We used to go out in the car on Sundays to Richmond Park, but then soon our people started to wear out, fall ill and die. My father had served in the second war and never really got over what he had seen in the Engineers; he started to get ill and die. My father liked to do everything himself, drive the car; when he got so bad that he couldn’t, nor split the kindling any more, my mother turned to us in despair and said I can’t drive or split wood, these are men’s jobs. Yet she was sick herself and died before he did. They sat opposite each other in the sitting-room, upright, each watching the other get worse and die; or he would gaze for hours, silently, at his favourite picture, the good reproduction of a country cottage with a rose-garden which he had hung above the fire. Then Julie and I saw our mother go, after years of watching my father sit and die.

  As for Julie and me, I held her tight, comforting her as she wept into a cheese plant at their home after that last row she had with her husband Harry, the get-rich-quick lad in the sports-gear game.

  I love my sister Julie, I used always to look forward to going down on my free days to the villa they had outside Oxford, and it was fine for a long time until one night I saw the look on her face and I said dear, you’re sick with worry, what is it, there’s like a frost on your face. Oh, she said to me, I must speak to someone – I’m sickened, yes, sickened by Harry now, he has a go at all the girls and he’s behind on the mortgage and he doesn’t care about me and the child any more; he spends his time at the clubs. Don’t worry about it, I said, that’s the kind of thing that happens sometimes in any marriage. Oh no, she said, this is different. He hit me the other night for the first time in his life, and I’m really worried.

  It was dreadful to see my sister so upset, we had always got on so tight and well, she was like my other self, we agreed so well, my only family, with her big arms and bustling skirt and cheerful face (hello, love, there you are at last, nice to see you, have a cup of tea, I’m making one, how are the criminals then?), and to see her now, pale and flat, pale as a candle flame in daytime. Gone her burly warmth that had been a haven, gone her sending Harry and me off to the Maid’s Head (Mind you’re not back late, you two, the shepherd’s pie’ll spoil, you know, it’ll be on the table at three). All that was left of that generous affection was her worry for her child and her spontaneous tears in my arms. And yet again, as with my own wife and daughter, I was at first so blind that I could not see that between Julie and Harry many little tragedies were constructing the great tragedy that wipes out all the pleasures of our memory – a joke, a kiss, a hard night out with friends, the sensation of loved bare flesh, music hummed in the dark, kicking a stone by lamplight down a road, all small things that make existence both exciting and possible.