Ashes by Now

by Mark Timlin

  21

  So that was that. Enough said, and we didn’t mention it again that night.

  ‘Want a joint?’ asked Dawn.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I said.

  ‘Want another beer?’ asked Tracey.

  I nodded. ‘Are you two working tonight?’

  Dawn shook her head as she took a ready-rolled joint out of her handbag. ‘No. Tracey’s got a date. I thought I’d stay and keep you company. Is that all right?’

  ‘Course it is.’

  Tracey went to the kitchen for my beer, came back, and when she handed it to me, kissed me on the cheek. ‘I’d better be off,’ she said. ‘Can’t keep my gentleman waiting. Now you two be good and don’t do anything I wouldn’t.’ And she collected her jacket and left.

  ‘Do you want something to eat?’ asked Dawn.

  ‘I’m OK. Maybe later.’

  ‘There’s plenty in.’

  ‘Good home cooking, eh?’

  She smiled. ‘As good as Marks can do.’

  She lit the joint, took a hit and passed it to me. I popped the tab on the can that Tracey had given me. It was freezing cold, and I had to catch the froth quickly in my mouth.

  She was a lot smarter than she let on, was Dawn. A couple of times she’d started to talk to me about her life, and it wasn’t like her talking at all. Not like the scrubber she pretended to be, and let the world see. Each time she’d done it, she seemed to realise what she was saying and stopped. As if she was embarrassed.

  That night she didn’t stop.

  ‘You’re all right, Nick, do you know that?’ she said.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yeah. You’re like us. Bent.’

  ‘Am I?’ I asked again. ‘You reckon?’

  ‘Not like that, stupid,’ she said. ‘Not gay. Bent. Not straight. Know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You couldn’t be straight if you tried. I bet deep down inside you always knew that, didn’t you?’

  I shrugged. She wanted to talk, so I just let her.

  ‘But you did try. You must have. How could you have been a copper, and married an uptight cow like that Laura, or whatever her name was, otherwise?’

  She knew exactly what her name was.

  ‘Mind, your daughter was sweet. She is like you. I could tell. Poor baby. You just hope she doesn’t end up like you. No, you couldn’t be straight. You’re like us. Me and Trace. You don’t give a fuck. Not on the outside anyway. Nobody knows what goes on inside though, do they, Nick?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Did she leave you?’ she asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your wife.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Why?’ She shook her blonde mop. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t ask things like that. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘It’s history now. Ancient history.’

  Dawn didn’t say anything, and I knew she wanted me to tell her.

  ‘It’s the old, old story, darlin’,’ I said. ‘I was screwing other women. Lots of other women. Taking a shitload of drugs. I was never at home. You know the sort of thing. But worst of all I didn’t love her enough.’

  ‘No man ever loves a woman enough,’ Dawn said.

  ‘That’s a pretty profound statement.’

  ‘True though.’

  ‘You might be right. I’m the wrong person to ask. Laura said I had an emotional death wish.’

  ‘And did you? Do you?’

  ‘Maybe I did. I can’t remember. Maybe I still do. I don’t know.’

  ‘No wonder you’re so fucked up,’ she said.

  ‘Who, me?’

  ‘Yes, you. Totally screwed.’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe I am, babe,’ I said. ‘But what can I do about it? It’s what I am. What you see is what you get, and that’s a fact.’

  I lit a cigarette and leaned back on the pillow and drank some more beer.

  ‘And that’s the thing I like most about you,’ said Dawn. ‘See. Most people think what me and Trace do is sick. Loving each other. How can love be sick? But you don’t care. I’ve seen you looking at the people you’ve met with us: TVs, TSs, other dykes, gay blokes, the Skin Two mob. A lot of people get upset by them. You, you just carry on like it’s perfectly natural. You couldn’t give a fuck.’

  ‘Why should I?’ I said. ‘They don’t interfere with me. I don’t interfere with them. Whatever turns you on. Ain’t that right?’

  ‘Sure. But not everybody sees it like that. Do you know what I think, Nick?’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think you’re really alive until you’ve died a bit. And the first time I ever saw you, in that club that afternoon, sitting all alone, not saying nothing, just watching and listening, I knew that you’d died a bit. You have, haven’t you?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘Some people don’t,’ she went on. ‘Nothing ever happens to them. They live all their lives without anything really bad happening. Then they die. But I don’t call that living at all. Then there’s others. The ones I feel really sorry for. They do everything right all their lives. Work, get married, have kids, get a mortgage. And then suddenly one day they die a bit. You see them on TV. On the news. Their kid’s been snatched, or someone close has been murdered. You can see it in their faces. They’re going bent on nationwide TV. And you just know they’re never going to be able to handle it.

  ‘But people like us, we’re different. We can handle it. It’s like we belong to a club. We’ve always been different. Always been bent. We’re survivors. Like we’ve had thousands of little cuts all our lives, until one cut goes so deep and hurts so much that no one is ever going to be able to cut you that deep again. The scar’s so hard that nothing can get through.’

  In a way she was right.

  ‘What was yours?’ I asked.

  ‘My husband and my baby… You never knew I was married, did you, Nick?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I was only a kid. Seventeen. Still at school. And I was clever too. I was taking A levels, and I could have gone to university. But I had to have a boyfriend. I had to know what it was all about. Be grown up. And then I fell for the baby. So we got married. I couldn’t have had an abortion. I would never have forgiven myself. My baby was born on my eighteenth birthday. She’d be twelve now. That’s about the same age as your daughter, isn’t it?’

  I nodded for a third time.

  ‘Kim, we called her. That was his idea. And he really loved her. He wasn’t really all that bright. But that didn’t matter. He’d’ve done anything for that baby. And for me. But differently, if you know what I mean. He worshipped Kim from the day she was born. He was a real dad. And he wasn’t much more than a kid himself. He changed her nappies. Bathed her. Fed her. Took her out in the pram. He loved it. And he was such a man. I really loved him too. I’d never as much as looked at another bloke since the day I met him.

  ‘He was in the building game. And did he work. He’d do anything. And we were happy then. I’ll never forget that. Being happy. It’s been such a long time since I was. Really happy, I mean.

  ‘Yeah, we were content, Nick. We had each other, and Kim, and a little money coming in regularly. And the old house at the back of East Street that we’d bought cheap, and he did up till it was like a palace.

  ‘He started out on his own after a bit. Bought a van. Then one Friday it happened. I was working part time in the launderette down the road from where we lived, and he had a big job on, and his mum said she’d take Kim. His mum and dad had moved down towards Kent by then, and we were still in Walworth. But what with the motorway being built, it hardly took any time to get down there. So he set off really early to drop Kim off. He’d fitted one of those baby seats for her in the van. A real good job
he did too. It was anchored to the floor of the van with great big bolts. Afterwards the police said it was the only part of the van that was still where it started out.’

  She was crying by then, but I didn’t comfort her. She didn’t want comfort, I could tell. Just to remember and to talk about it to someone. So I let her get on with it.

  ‘They said he was going down the motorway at about fifty in the slow lane. They had witnesses. But even if they hadn’t, I know he’d never go fast, not with Kim on board. Then all of a sudden one of those banks of fog you read about came down, out of nowhere. One minute the sun was shining and you could see for miles. The next you couldn’t see the end of the bonnet. People were driving into that fog at a hundred miles an hour or more.’

  She shook her head at the futility of it.

  ‘A thirty-ton truck hit him up the backside. Pushed him into another truck that had stopped dead in the fog. Him and Kim were both killed outright. Crushed. They wouldn’t let me see the bodies, said it would be too much. I wanted to, but they wouldn’t let me.

  ‘It wouldn’t have mattered though. How bad they were. Because the day they died, I died. I was just twenty when it happened. And they were all there to help me. His mates. They were queuing up to help me. Help themselves more like. And do you know I was in bed with one of them the night after they were both killed? I was so alone and lonely that I let one of them have me. He brought round a bottle of Scotch and a load of grass. I’d never smoked a joint before that night, believe it or not. It made me so horny it hurt. My little family hadn’t been dead for two days and I was fucking my husband’s best mate. Lovely, eh?’

  She was crying harder, and her eyes were bruised from rubbing the tears away. But still I left her alone.

  ‘I ended up in bed with most of them in the end,’ she went on. ‘It was just for a bit of comfort really. A bit of company at night. But with that lot, you couldn’t have company without the other. Know what I mean? But none of them were like him. Not even close. He was a real athlete. In bed and out of it. He was a lovely boy. Some of his mates got a bit heavy too. See, they thought I was weak and vulnerable. A soft touch. But I wasn’t. By then the scar was too deep. I went case with them because I wanted to. They didn’t like it being my choice and not theirs. And what was worse was that, after a bit, they knew they couldn’t hurt me. Not inside. Not where it matters. I didn’t give a shit for any of them really. I didn’t care if they went back with their wives or out with some other sort. I didn’t give a monkey’s. So I s’pose they thought that if they couldn’t hurt me emotionally, they could hurt me physically.

  ‘One in particular. I made the mistake of moving in with him. I’d sold the house long ago, and pissed most of the money away. I didn’t care, see. I was dead, so what did it matter? Anyway, I moved in with this bloke. Eddie Spinetti his name was. I called him Eddie Spaghetti. He didn’t like that. But I didn’t care. He used to beat the shit out of me. He was a bad bastard, Nick, and I took it for nearly a year. Then I went to a woman’s shelter in Balham. I couldn’t handle it any more. Just left all my stuff and fucked off. That was where I met Liz. She used to help out at the place. A real bull dyke. At first she scared me more than Eddie did. But she was kind. She sort of took me under her wing. I told her all about Eddie. Then he found out where I was, and came round one afternoon. He busted the front door of the place down and came looking for me in my room. That was in the old days when the pubs used to shut at three. Remember?’

  How could I forget?

  ‘I remember,’ I said.

  ‘Liz had been out for a drink with a couple of her mates. All three of them bulls, and built like brick shithouses. They arrived at the shelter just as Eddie was kicking down my room door. They picked him up and took him out the back and gave him some of his own medicine. Then they dumped him outside Balham tube. Christ, they didn’t mess around. He ended up worse than you did. He lost a kidney. In hospital for four months, he was. And they went in and visited him. Told him that if he ever bothered me again they’d repeat the performance. And go round his local boozer and tell all his mates that it was women put him in hospital. He couldn’t have handled that. He’d been telling everyone he was set on by a gang of skinheads. So I never saw him again. After that I ended up as Liz’s femme. It was all right too. She didn’t have a cock, see. Nothing to prove. And do you know what? I never missed it at all. And she didn’t have to beat me up to show me that she loved me.’

  ‘What happened to her?’ I asked.

  ‘She was doing a bit of dealing – no, a lot. Old Bill was on her tail. She fucked off to Amsterdam to live. She wanted me to go with her, but I couldn’t. My baby and my husband are buried here. I couldn’t leave them; I have to walk on the same ground they’re part of. Otherwise I don’t know what I’d do. Then I met Trace. And I fell for her. Who wouldn’t? The soft cow. She’s the same as us.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She was abused as a kid by her dad. She’s mostly over it now. But she still don’t trust men.’

  ‘Who can blame her?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re right. But we trust you, love. I’ve talked to her about it. We could get it together, you and me. You’re the first man I’ve fucked because I want to, since Eddie. The others have been strictly business. I’d like another baby, see. Another chance. I think you only get one go at life. One turn. And then it’s over. And so far, my go’s been pretty well messed up. Mind you, I wouldn’t leave Trace. I still love her. I can’t change that. But we could all live together. Or close. I’d never do nothing with her unless you were there. And I wouldn’t mind you screwing her if you both wanted it. As long as I was there too. I wouldn’t want you two going off together, though.’

  ‘You’re as good as gold, Dawn,’ I said. ‘Better than gold in fact.’

  ‘I wonder how many birds you’ve said that to, Nick. Lots, I’ll bet. But they ain’t here are they? And I am. So what happened to you, Nick? What killed you inside, before your time?’

  I thought about it for a minute before I answered. How everything and everybody I’d ever cared about I’d walked away from, or had been violently snatched out of my grasp.

  ‘You know about my wife divorcing me, and taking Judith away,’ I said.

  Dawn nodded.

  ‘And some people died,’ I said. ‘Women. Two were killed. One died of cancer.’

  ‘Girlfriends?’ she asked.

  ‘Two were. One was a friend. Two were my fault. One wasn’t.’

  ‘And you still feel guilty?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I thought it was something like that,’ said Dawn. ‘Do you want to tell me about them?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not now,’ I said. ‘Maybe another time.’

  ‘That’s all right. One lot of true confessions is probably enough for one night. So what about it? Do you think we could get it together?’

  I shrugged again. ‘I don’t know, babe,’ I said. ‘It’s never occurred to me. I didn’t know that was what you wanted.’

  ‘I don’t know that I do,’ she replied. ‘But it might work. You never know.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ I said.

  ‘Think about it,’ she said, and winked, and got up and started to undress. ‘I’ll just pop into bed with you and show you what you’d be missing if you say no.’

  And she did.

  22

  The next morning we started to gather the evidence together.

  Dawn bought me a cardboard-covered exercise book to write in. On the front was a drawing of a galleon under full sail. I liked that. It seemed like a very apt illustration for a book about a sailor.

  I started off by writing down everything I remembered about the case. From day one. At the same time, quietly, we began to gather information. It’s not difficult if you’ve got the front and know what to say. The girls were great. Theatrical training, see.

 
We started off with the police officers involved.

  All but one had done fairly well over the past dozen or so years.

  Superintendent Byrne had done the best. He’d risen to become Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, a very senior post. He’d retired three years previously to live with his wife in a large detached house in its own grounds in Redhill. He’d received the MBE on his retirement, and there was talk of a knighthood within a few years.

  DI Grisham was now a commander in the flying squad, the legendary Sweeney. He was based at New Scotland Yard, and was a big man in the Job. He lived alone in a detached house in Dulwich.

  Sergeant Terry Collier was, as I knew to my own cost, now a DI at Peckham, on the same squad as Millar who had stalled at the rank of Detective Sergeant. Collier was divorced, and had a tiny house in a new development on the Peckham ground. Millar had a semi outside Croydon where he lived with his wife and two kids.

  DI Harvey was the only loser.

  He’d had a rough time of it all those years ago. Firstly his wife had died four years before Carol had been killed. Apparently he’d done a good job of bringing up his two daughters on his own. He’d been promoted to Detective Inspector two years before the murder took place, but then it had all started to fall apart for him.

  Harvey had taken to the booze in a big way after the crime had been committed. And his work had suffered. Eventually he’d taken a demotion to uniformed sergeant, and been transferred to the traffic section at Lewes. He was still there to this day, apparently a demoralized and bitter man.

  Who the hell could blame him?

  I borrowed a car off Charlie. An old Vauxhall Cavalier with more under the bonnet than it should have had. I used it to drive round and suss out where the four coppers and one ex-Assistant Commissioner lived. I wanted to get to know them a little better. In their native habitat, as it were. I couldn’t use my E-Type. It would have stuck out like a sore thumb and brought Collier back down on me like a ton of bricks.

  Apart from Harvey, who lived in a scruffy-looking purpose-built flat between Lewes and Haywards Heath, they all looked like they were doing well.