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

  Oh, didn’t I remember how middle-class Edie had been – the hiccough politely hidden behind the hand after a thin lunch, the distasteful use of the word toilet, the sitting room at Blackheath, the best china picked up as seconds in an Oxford Street sale. How, when we first met, she used to remove my hand from under her unfashionable skirt with surprising strength so as to plunge into labyrinths of meaningless genealogy, until it turned out that she was related through her mother to King Clovis of France.

  But her father was a tradesman in the fruit business, and cruel to his children; he and I never got on. ‘Edie marrying a copper,’ I heard him say to his wife on the eve of our marriage, ‘what’s the future for our girl in that?’

  Edie had lost her thread. ‘The writing on the wall,’ she was muttering. ‘King, king, king, king. The writing, the writing on the wall, the one with the – with the urine on it. There!’ she giggled bitterly. ‘I’ve said it, haven’t I?’

  ‘I’ve brought you these,’ I said. I had packed up some biscuits and toffees in a parcel. She used to like things like that; yes, in the old days, Edie had a sweet tooth.

  She took the parcel without looking at me and let it fall on the floor.

  ‘Oh, come,’ said the nurse, ‘now that’s a pity, Edie.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me,’ she sneered, looking past us.

  ‘I’ve never seen her so not on my wavelength,’ I said. ‘She’s worse.’

  ‘Worse?’ he said with bright guilt. ‘What, Edie? Why, she’s fine; she’s got a long, long way to go yet!’ It was what he had to say.

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘but don’t come the acid with me, friend.’

  Edie’s brow creased with fury, her look much farther off than the cement corner with the puddle of piss in it that she was gazing into. ‘Why don’t they show her the kind door?’ I said to the nurse. ‘Why imprison her?’

  ‘You should know,’ said the male nurse tartly, ‘you’re in the business yourself.’

  ‘You knew I was a copper?’

  ‘She keeps saying so.’

  ‘How do you stand this, day after day?’

  ‘The way you stand your job.’

  ‘These vulgar Hanoverians,’ said Edie. ‘They call themselves Windsor these days, but that’s a blag; they’re all Germans. What I don’t understand is, why they all join the navy. Why the navy? Why not the NAAFI?’ She burst out laughing and added triumphantly: ‘Anyway, I don’t fucking care. I’m a baroness in my own right. Plantagenet.’

  A haggard man who had wet the pants of his old suit started chasing an elderly visitor, who came out of charity and whom I had seen on other visits, for his cigarettes. They ran up and down the yard several times; at last the patient got the visitor cornered. They stood glaring at each other, the visitor out of fright.

  ‘Help!’ shouted the visitor in a high, feeble voice. ‘Help!’

  ‘It’s funny how they can always tell when you’re patronizing them,’ muttered the nurse. ‘I warned Mr Hodgkin last time not to come in here again. Wait a minute, I’ll just see to it.’ He went off down the day room, his nylon jacket rustling.

  ‘I don’t care how many affairs they have,’ said Edie viciously. ‘These German kings, they breed like rabbits. They’re outsiders! Rabbits!’ She started to scream, dribbling down her rubber bib.

  The male nurse, who had ushered the visitor out, heard the noise and rejoined me, shaking his head. He ignored Edie. ‘They’re all disturbed on this wing,’ he said. ‘You just can’t condescend the way Mr Hodgkin does. They spot it every time.’ Edie had her back turned to us again. Suddenly she farted. ‘Fuck!’ she said. She added, tight-lipped: ‘There! That wasn’t a ladylike thing to do.’

  I said to myself – wait for me in hell, I’ll come to you.

  Edie shouted: ‘The next time I do that I’m going to explode! Do you hear me? Explode! When I get where I’m going I’ll take you all with me – every copper in the world! There’ll be millions of us, with bombs and candles! We’ll go downstairs into the dark, down into the last inch of hell and get my baby back! I’ll drag her out!’ She wasn’t looking at us but through the window, banging her clenched hands on the bars and screaming: ‘Dahlia! Your father strangled you with his bare hands! Big, white, peaceful hands! He pushed you, Dahlia! When he’s looking at you he smells of shit – that’s right, his eyes smell of shit! That’s why I never look at him!’

  ‘I’d better do something about her,’ said the nurse. He went off.

  ‘Edie,’ I said. ‘Edie.’ She didn’t answer, or even move; I might as well not have been there. She stood with her right fist raised, suddenly arrested as she was about to strike the bars again. ‘Prime bines,’ she muttered, ‘prime bines!’ Her figure stood firmly in black shoes splayed well apart, statue to a terrible energy. The nurse came back carrying a needle and an ampoule, a syringe in a tray. He sterilized the needle, screwed it to the syringe, charged it, and with one practised hand whipped Edie’s clothes up over her head.

  ‘They’re going to introduce me to it now all right,’ said Edie slyly from under her skirt. She chuckled with satisfaction as the nurse caught her round the middle. There were excreta on her dead white buttocks. The nurse chose his moment, swabbed a place on her flesh; then the needle plunged brightly in. ‘There we are,’ said the nurse. He dropped the syringe back in the tray and looked at his watch. He brushed her skirt down straight like a perfunctory husband.

  ‘That’s why the bastard copper used my hands,’ said Edie slowly. Her voice dripped with malice. ‘He used my hands to kill my little girl.’ I realized I had begun to cry. ‘He was too cunning to leave any clues,’ she said. ‘I’m faint,’ she added, sitting down suddenly on the day bed. A middle-aged woman opposite, engaged in destroying the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, watched every move Edie made, laughing like a hyena; a single incisor jutted greyly out of the side of her mouth like a broken slate.

  ‘That’s enough of that, Mrs Singlestick,’ the nurse said.

  Edie had turned on her side, facing the wall. ‘Everything backfires on you,’ she mumbled, ‘especially little motionless faces.’

  ‘What was that you gave her?’ I said.

  ‘Evipan. She’ll sleep now.’ He looked at me, then put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Look, if I were you I’d leave.’

  So I left Edie, surrounded by toffees and broken biscuit which had fallen out of the packet when she dropped it and which the other patients already had an eye on.

  I went back to London. I thought, what’s the point of going to see her any more? She doesn’t know me.

  She murdered our daughter back in 1979. Her name was Dahlia, after Edie’s favourite flower. Edie pushed her under a bus, like that, in the street, because the child had picked up a bar of chocolate as they went past the shelves in the supermarket and hidden it, and there had been a stupid row with the manageress. Dahlia was nine.

  I choked on my grief behind the windscreen as soon as I was alone, a vague face among other faces in other cars in the heavy traffic.

  Oh, Edie, Edie, are you the same woman who, when you conceived Dahlia, looked up at me from the bed with your ultramarine eyes that were always too dark and murmured, stroking my face: ‘I know I’m moving with a new life now; I must sleep.’

  Oh, sleep, Edie, sleep.

  And let our cry come unto Thee.

  8

  When I had finished my report on the suicide I pushed it away and picked up a copy of the Recorder that I had brought in with me. On page 3 there was a report on the Police Special Powers Act, which had just been thrown out of Parliament after its first reading. The headline ran: Proposed Bill Rejected – Unreasonable, Unworkable and Dangerous.

  Well, yes, it had been thrown out, but I reckoned not for long; it would be back, perhaps in a different form, perhaps looking more innocuous – not tomorrow, possibly not even the day after, but doubtless the day after that. It would look, on the surface, like a good strong bill to protect the public, particularly against ac
ts of terrorism; but I was sure that, just as in its rejected prototype, there would be vague elements in it; there would be bad law. The bill as proposed would, for instance, have enabled me to arrest a man without a warrant and hold him in police custody for a period not exceeding seven days. It would have enabled me to cull the most private facts of a suspect’s existence without his knowledge, taking my time while he was held downstairs in the cells. He would, meanwhile, have had no contact whatever with the outside world, not even with a solicitor, and seven days in police custody, subject to close interrogation, can seem a very long time. If called on to justify my action all I would have to say was: ‘I have reason to believe that this individual was in the process of committing, or conspiring to commit, an offence in contravention of the Special Powers Act.’ That would have been sufficient. It was a formula that a police officer could have stretched to include anybody.

  It was what I thought of as banana laws – the law of a society in the process of breaking down. Once properly tightened up, it would have meant that I could stop and arrest a man in the street simply because I didn’t like the look on his face, or the way his pockets bulged. It would have synchronized nicely with the plastic ID cards that every citizen would be required to carry by then, and before long we would have turned the country into a birdcage.

  I asked myself whether this was the type of law I would ever want to enforce. If it ever passed onto the statute book we would effectively be released from any serious accountability to the public. Populations don’t like it; I remembered what had happened, in a film I had seen, to the police in Budapest in 1956 when the public had got hold of them during the brief insurrection under Imre Nagy. Infuriated, the people tore them apart with their bare hands.

  Bowman and I had discussed some of these implications on a slack day some weeks previously.

  ‘This new legislation’s going to be the making of us,’ he said complacently, going to sit on the corner of my desk, ‘if it goes through OK.’

  ‘No, you’re wrong, Charlie.’

  ‘What do you mean, wrong? And don’t call me Charlie.’

  ‘I work it out that you’re wrong, chief inspector – we’re here to protect the public, not treat everyone like villains.’

  ‘Look, why don’t you take a stroll down Railton Road,’ he scoffed, ‘or run down to Peckham on a Saturday night? Refresh your memory. And get stuffed.’

  ‘It’d be too much power,’ I said. ‘It would only make people really loathe us – I don’t like it.’

  ‘What I don’t like,’ said Bowman, turning red, ‘is low-ranking police officers who think they’ve got brains.’

  ‘Higher-ranking ones without any are even worse.’

  ‘Listen, you don’t understand the first thing about any of this,’ said Bowman, his pig’s eyes glittering with rage, ‘it’s way above your head. And talking of heads I could thump you on yours and what’s more, one of these days I’m going to.’

  ‘Well, get fit first,’ I said. ‘Look at you, the sweat you’re in just sitting there, you wouldn’t last a round.’

  He licked his lips. ‘You’re a right comedian, you are,’ he said. ‘Christ, why is it I always have to get tangled up with you?’

  ‘One, it’s fate,’ I said. ‘Second, and this is more practical, you reckon that unless a case makes headlines it isn’t good enough for you. Your ego’s almost as swollen as your liver, so you work on the lines that if a murder’s just dull and obscure, it’s simply crap that you can leave to people like me.’

  ‘You’d better watch your tongue,’ said Bowman. ‘You really had.’

  ‘No chance,’ I said, ‘and don’t yield to your lousy judgement and get me fired, otherwise you might find yourself having to sweep the shit up all by yourself instead of having A14 to do it for you.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Bowman, ‘don’t you care about your bleeding pension? They still pay something out, you know, even down on Unexplained Deaths.’

  ‘The way the world’s going now,’ I said, ‘none of us are going to live long enough to collect it – and if you think these powers would have changed that tendency then all I can say is, get a new battery, Charlie, your bulb’s gone out.’

  ‘Look, darling,’ said Bowman, ‘if I hear one more word out of you about these powers you’ll be in trouble, a lot of trouble, see?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about it, I wouldn’t like them. What? Pick a man up because I don’t like the look of him? Hold him for up to seven days without a warrant? Turn his place over just because I feel like it? Check him out on the police computer and find out when was the last time he changed his knickers? That’s not police work, it’s just idleness. It’s also bloody frightening if you’re on the wrong end of it, as any refugee from Eastern Europe could tell you. If I’ve got reason to suspect a man I’ll go and see him, question him, try and trap him, see if I’ve got grounds to make an arrest. But just questions, understand? I don’t arrest the man first, and then break him down under these proposed powers just because he happens to have shown up on some fucking computer, do you get the difference?’

  ‘But Parliament will have decided these powers!’ Bowman shouted. ‘It’ll all have been voted! It’ll all be democratic!’

  ‘Democratic my arsehole,’ I said. ‘MPs, a load of smooth talkers, some of them no better than they should be. Look, Charlie, haven’t you any imagination at all? Don’t you understand what this act would mean for a man? Terrorism, that’s one thing. But those powers could be bent to fit nearly anybody! You could be pulling a geezer under them because he’d done three months for tea-leafing fifteen years ago if you liked! You could have him banged up at the Factory for a week if you wanted, and we all know what that means. He can’t ring a lawyer. He can’t get bail. Christ, if you think that’s democratic, Charlie, then I just give up.’

  ‘Well, it’ll be the law if it goes through, sergeant,’ said Bowman stubbornly, ‘and that’s what you and I are here to uphold.’ He added: ‘I can’t wait, myself. This act’ll improve our solution rate no end, which is very largely what it’s for.’

  ‘Yes, I’m interested in the solution rate all right,’ I said, ‘only I want our cases solved correctly. Frightening a man with these powers into admitting to something he hasn’t done, that’s not what I call solved, see?’

  ‘No,’ said Bowman, ‘I don’t see. I’ll tell you the only thing I can see is that you’re getting dangerously close to taking a political view on this, and politics is none of your business, sergeant. Parliament votes a law; it goes on the statute book; our job is just to enforce it.’

  ‘Oh, you’re just being simplistic,’ I said, ‘let it go, you’re a hundred years behind.’

  ‘I’m better than you,’ he said, ‘letting your poor, weak, silly brains get befuddled from reading too many newspapers.’

  ‘I know we’re both here to enforce the law,’ I said, ‘what matters to me is, what law? I’m not going to just go striding along life’s path enforcing any old law. The difference between us is that I try and analyse the law I enforce, whereas you just blindly carry it out. And I’ll go further, Charlie; I sometimes think that the reason you carry out the law as it stands without asking yourself questions is that you find promotion comes easier that way.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ he roared.

  ‘Also,’ I said, ‘it’s less wear and tear on the brain. The more you’ve got a blank cheque, the less you’ll have to worry about, you’re covered.’

  He closed his fists and stood up; I thought he was going to have a go. Instead he said ominously: ‘Is there anything else you’d like to say, sergeant? Come on. Why not take this conversation a step further? Why not come straight out and say I’m bent; or that I’m not carrying my duties out correctly? Because then we could get everything between us sorted out – we could repeat this talk in front of a third officer, and then we could all three go up and see the superintendent. What do you say?’

  ‘Don’t bludgeon me,�
�� I said. ‘I’m not saying you’re bent. I haven’t used the word; I’m just pointing out your failure to think. I was just putting another point of view to you. I’m not trying to prove anything, I was trying to get you to understand something.’

  ‘Well, don’t bother,’ said Bowman. He looked satisfied and stood for a moment rubbing his right fist in his open left hand. He shrugged. ‘Anyway,’ he added, ‘if you will stay a sergeant you’ll always get the shitty end of the stick.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but I think that’s the end where the truth is.’

  I got up and left.

  9

  The old grain warehouse was in New Dock Road, and the caretaker was waiting for us. He looked cretinous, and smelled of last night’s beer. ‘What you want, gents,’ he said eagerly, ‘is the big granary on the second floor up there. That’s where it was done, that’s where the bags are.’

  ‘You’re a ghoul,’ said Bowman, ‘shut your gob.’

  Two photographers snapped us as we got to the door and a reporter stepped up, a young man. ‘Daily Recorder,’ he said. ‘I wonder if you could—’

  ‘No I couldn’t,’ said Bowman.

  I turned to the reporter and said: ‘You want to come up? OK, up you come, then.’

  ‘You don’t want him hanging around,’ said Bowman.

  ‘I’ll play this my way,’ I said. ‘It’s my case, and you’re in a hurry.’

  He gave me one look, one of the straight kind, turned and got into the back of the Rover. It took off in a puff of rubber fury.

  ‘OK,’ I said to the reporter, ‘come on.’

  I go where the ghosts are, I go where the evil is. I had that phrase going round in my mind. I started upstairs with the young man behind me. I called back to the caretaker: ‘You needn’t wait. I know where to find you if I want you. You’ve made a statement, haven’t you?’ It was plain to me that what he wanted was to make it all over again, which invariably, in my experience, meant he had nothing to say. People with something to say, you had to prise and tease it out of them.