by Baker, John
‘What’s your interest, Sam? I know you, once you get your teeth into something.’
‘I’d tell you if I had anything,’ Sam said. ‘But I don’t. A completely different case threw up a connection with Pammy Wright. But my man only knew her when they were at school together, when she was a girl called Pammy Shelton. I don’t know anything new about the Surgeon.’
‘Then, why the questions?’
‘I got waylaid. After I talked with Pammy’s mother I wanted to know more.’
‘So you came to the oracle.’
‘Yeah, Sly. For enlightenment.’ They turned around on the pavement and walked back the way they had come. ‘Is there forensic evidence connecting the three murders?’
‘Yeah, the guy’s got a roll of washing line. When he’s ready for the next kill he cuts a piece off specially for the job.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Not hard evidence. But the MO is almost identical. They’re all women. Nothing is ever stolen. They’re not raped or sexually assaulted. They’re all strangled in their kitchens. And after they’re dead he gouges their eyes out.’
‘Sounds like someone with a mission.’
‘Too fucking true, Sammy boy,’ said Sly turning into the Press offices. ‘If you hang on for a minute I’ll get you photocopies of the file. Then you’ll know as little as the rest of us.’
19
Billy is asleep when Smiley comes. Diana is ready for bed, she has washed and brushed her hair. The hem of her white nightie is showing beneath her dressing-gown. She takes him by the hand and shows him the table which she has helped you to set. She points to the candles and explains that they are not to be lit until the meal is served.
They sit on either side of the fireplace, their faces lit by the flames as you baste the lamb one last time. Diana has discovered a face of utter serenity. She sits with her hands clasped together in her lap, her wondering eyes drinking in the potent sweetness of this god who has descended on her house.
‘Billy’s in bed,’ she tells him. ‘He’s too young to stay up.’ Smiley shrugs his shoulders, shifts uncomfortably in the chair. He has nothing to say to her. He tugs at his cravat and looks at the pictures on the wall.
‘We don’t usually have a fire,’ Diana continues. ‘It’s specially for you.’ Her wide eyes follow the movements of his fingers as he scratches his nose.
‘Mmm,’ he says, making a superhuman effort. ‘Mmm.’ And a little later, ‘Mmm. Hmm.’
‘It’s lamb,’ says Diana, leaning forward in her chair, gaining confidence from his obvious encouragement. ‘In the oven? Lamb with mint sauce and potatoes. Are you hungry?’ Smiley opens his mouth, but then closes it again, contenting himself with a nod of the head. Diana sits back in the chair, satisfied. She lets the serenity seep back into her face, and speaks again, her voice steady. ‘Do you know my name? It’s Diana Miriam Greenhills.’
‘Mmm. Hmm.’
‘And you’re called Smiley,’ she says. ‘Smiley Thompson. Is it true? Are you really called Smiley?’
He clears his throat and finds a word. ‘Yes.’
‘Oh.’ Diana leaps from her chair and jumps up and down on the carpet. ‘Wonderful. It’s the most wonderful name in the world. Smiley. It’s so, so happy.’ She claps her hands together and rushes through to the kitchen. ‘It’s true, Dora,’ she says. ‘He is called Smiley. He is. He really is.’
When you have put her to bed you light the candles and serve the lamb. Smiley comes alive in his memories. He talks of the campaigns and the personalities of the Party before ’56 and the later betrayals, Czechoslovakia, Poland. He was born in the year that Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government resigned, and was visiting the seventy-year-old Ernest Bevin the day that China invaded Tibet. The old man talked him out of a career in politics, something that Smiley has regretted for the rest of his life.
You were ten then, Dora. Dylan Thomas was wandering Under Milk Wood between orgies of alcoholism, but the memory of his lips had already faded. You knew nothing about the Chinese invasion of Tibet. You were in love with King George VI and his beautiful daughters Elizabeth and Margaret. You cried when he died. It seemed so unfair.
Smiley tells you he has been dreaming about your body, and you push the fat of the lamb to the side of your plate and stand. You are already forty-one. Your body has a lot of lost time to make up.
Lady Day is singing ‘Carelessly’ on the turntable but neither of you is listening.
Afterwards, when Smiley has gone home to his wife, you go to the children’s rooms to tuck them in. Billy is a sleeping angel spilling out of the quilt. Diana is clutching a photograph of Smiley, stolen from your dressing-table. It is wet with her kisses.
20
Russell Wright told Sam where Billy lived. Wright didn’t know Billy personally, but his name was entered in an old address book which had belonged to Pammy. The house was in St Mary’s, a bleak edifice, badly in need of paint and general maintenance. It was dusk when he arrived, and Sam found himself walking past the front door. He had intended to knock on the door and confront Billy, tell him that Dora was ill, that she wanted to see him. But he didn’t do it. Instead, he walked beyond the house, then crossed over to the other side of St Mary’s and slowly retraced his steps.
Some kind of instinct at work? Sam didn’t know what it was. There was an unconscious process going on which had kept him from knocking on Billy’s door, and he needed to sort out what it was. Alcoholics learn to distrust the unconscious, knowing better than most that it plans disasters for them, and for everyone around them. He glanced at the house as he passed, noted that all was in darkness apart from a single attic light which was so dim it could have been a candle. Then he negotiated the small pedestrian passage and steps which led him on to Marygate Lane. He made his way towards the Museum Gardens, but when he got there the gate was locked. He took the river path instead, and eventually sat on the same bench he had used earlier to eat his sandwich. There it was again, that old river rolling along.
The moon came up and Sam shook his head slowly from side to side. He hadn’t knocked on the door because he’d put Billy in the frame for the murders of three women. Yeah, there it was, summary justice. He’d never met the guy, had no evidence against him apart from a flimsy possible connection with Pammy Wright, and he’d already convinced himself that Billy, the son of Dora, the brother of Diana, was a serial killer.
And it’s always the way that as soon as you do that, as soon as you make that kind of judgement, then everything else, every event and coincidence just goes to prove that you were right in the first place. So the fact that the building Billy lives in hasn’t been painted, and the dim light in the guy’s bedroom, all conspire to augment his guilt.
Sam smiled to himself. That was one of the great drawbacks to being a detective. You had to think everyone was guilty. Oh, sure, Billy Greenhills was the Surgeon, he probably killed India Blake as well. Different MO, but what the hell, she was a woman, and Billy killed women. At least three we know about, probably a whole lot more we don’t know about, yet, in different parts of the country.
Look at this. The guy lives alone. He has no contact with his family. Probably masturbates and lives off the state. Never changes his socks.
Blow the fucker away.
Sam Turner, radical, liberal thinker and social reformer. Move over, Mother Teresa, there’s a rival on the scene.
He walked back to St Mary’s, and this time he would have knocked on Billy’s door, except that Billy left the house and made his way towards Bootham, while Sam was still seventy metres away. Sam followed, telling himself that’s what detectives do. Getting into that old familiar argument with himself: I don’t wanna shout out the guy’s name in the street in the dark, then go through all that business of introducing myself, making sure he’s who I think he is. And I know I don’t have to follow him, but why not? I’m here. He’s here. I might learn something. OK, so I’m a bloodhound. That’s how I got into this kind of work.
Billy walked to High Petergate and went into the York Arms. He bought himself a pint and took it through into the back room. Sam got an orange juice and stood at the bar close to the entrance, so he’d see when Billy left.
After twenty minutes Sam walked through the back to the Gents. Billy was sitting alone at a small round table, about a third of a pint of beer in front of him. The other tables in the room were occupied by couples and groups. A hen party had put two tables together and commandeered all the unused chairs and stools in the room, so that Billy’s table had no spare seats at it. He was swarthy. Thick, well-shaped lips. He had Dora’s chin. His hair was styled like Elvis Presley’s, but without the sideburns. It rose in a quiff at the front, and then sailed backwards over his head, held in place with enough gel to get a trifle started. His eyes were deep set and dark, hidden beneath pronounced brows, just a glitter there, a flash of white. A large elastoplast was sticking to the front of his throat.
When he got back to the bar, Sam was disappointed. The glance he’d had of Billy had not been enough. It was as if he hadn’t seen him at all. He’d seen what Billy had wanted to project. But that projection contained no essence of the man behind it. It was a mask.
Was he wearing make-up?
Sam listened to a monologue from the table behind him. A middle-aged man’s voice said: ‘We’re all up for grabs as far as he’s concerned. The guy’s got the morals of an alley cat. What do you think, Sugar?’
Sam half turned his body so that he could get a picture of the face behind the voice. Middle-aged, as he’d guessed, rotund and fresh-faced, going bald. Sugar was a tall guy with a moustache, reminiscent of Freddie Mercury in the old days, long ago.
In this town there was no such thing as a bar without a poet or a philosopher. Does anybody know what we are living for?
Sam struggled through another orange juice before Billy left the pub. Counted to twenty-five and hit the pavement behind him. There were still several people about, flitting among the Pubs and restaurants, gazing in the lighted windows of the shops. Billy took a slow, sauntering walk towards Stonegate, where he mingled with groups of tourists, and parties of drinkers outside Ye Olde Starre Inn and the Punch Bowl. A busker playing a battered guitar was insistent that he was the piano man, and, sure, he could be a movie star if he once got away from this place. Sam watched him for a full minute, then dropped a coin into his cup. The guy was really shook.
A saxophone some place far off played.
A table was overturned and a couple erupted into a spitting, scratching battle on the pavement. The chaos came out of nowhere. Suddenly they faced each other, talons drawn. She went for his eyes, and he brushed her aside and pushed with both hands on her chest. She staggered back, her arms flailing to maintain balance, but she was always going down. A couple of latter day knights decided to bruise her assailant’s kidneys, and a running fight developed.
‘A pretty piece of business,’ someone said. The crowd quickly divided into those who wanted to stay, perhaps join in the fun, and others who favoured a change of scenery. The girl who had gone down was back on her feet. She screamed something unintelligible at her boyfriend and stalked off towards Coney Street.
Billy followed.
Sam was not far behind.
Maybe he wasn’t following her, just travelling in the same direction. Except he was close to her, dogging her footsteps. Not so close that she felt threatened, though she’d obviously drunk a lot, and might not have noticed him. Billy kept ten metres behind, and followed her on the same side of the street. After Coney Street she went past the fire station and eventually stood with her finger on a bell of a flat in Fishergate. Billy crossed over the road then, and stood inside a bus shelter, watching until a man answered the door and pulled her inside.
Sam watched the watcher.
Billy stayed inside the bus shelter for a further ten minutes. Then he made his way back across town to St Mary’s. Sam followed. They passed hopeful whores and despairing ones. Billy let himself into the house and Sam heard him locking out the world, a mortise lock, and a couple of bolts at top and bottom.
Later, at home, Sam looked at a couple of photographs. Both black and white. The first showed Billy as a boy, fifteen years old. Dark eyes staring out of a white face. There was a trace of Dora there, around the mouth, but the broad forehead and the setting for those eyes were a direct gift from Arthur, the subject of the second photograph.
Arthur was not posing. He appeared to be staring into space, unconscious, and the photographer, probably Dora, had caught him in profile. Someone else might have made something of the photograph, taken hints from the way Arthur was holding his body, diagnosed character and personality. Sam couldn’t do that. He saw a guy who’d been dead for seventeen years. Someone who’d made a final decision, decided not to pass on any more replicas of his forehead and his eyes.
He let both photographs lie where they fell on the desk. He felt in his inside pocket for another one, and looked at that for several minutes. It was a copy of a photograph Marie had given him of India Blake. She was a truly beautiful woman. A stylish coat over a black lace blouse and a knee-length skirt. She was gazing past the photographer, at the future, wondering what it might hold, and not guessing the truth. His eyes were always drawn back to her face. The symmetry of her features. Flawless. Completely beautiful and completely dead.
21
William threw off the covers and stretched himself out on the bed. He slept with the window open and the morning air was sharp. Glancing down along his pale body he watched the goose pimples raising themselves up to defend his borders. Mindless, the struggle for survival, cellular, molecular.
As the dawn took its course and light slowly filtered through the curtains he felt his body temperature dropping. He didn’t move, that would be cheating. If he moved his heart would respond and send a warm rush of blood to all those peripheral regions. What William wanted was the opposite; he wanted his heart to slow down, his blood to run cold.
There were people in the world who could slow their heart rate to a fraction of its normal activity. Some of the Brahmin holy men could wind it right down to a few beats a minute. William’s heart, at rest, was normally sixty-four beats a minute, but in his morning sessions he could get it down to under forty. He could control it.
He could begin to feel how his father had felt.
William had first experienced the cold, real cold, when he had touched his father that day they took him down from the tree. His mother had taken them upstairs, William and his big sister, left them in the large front bedroom while she went to a neighbour’s house for help. His sister had said they must stay there, but William wanted to be with his father. ‘You can’t make me stay,’ he’d told her. ‘You’re only ten, and you’re a girl.’
‘Daddy’s dead,’ his sister had said. ‘We’ll never see him again.’
William shook her off and went down to the garden Daddy was there, swinging on the tree, gently, back and forth, swaying. He didn’t answer when William spoke to him. Daddy didn’t say anything, but he knew William was there, and he was glad they’d come back. He was much fatter than William remembered. It was as if he was full of air, like a huge tyre that had been blown up too much. He was still William’s father, but a person with all that air inside them might burst.
What it was, he was stuck up there in the tree. The rope around his neck was keeping him from speaking. A person with a rope around their neck, they wouldn’t be able to speak, even if they wanted to. And the rope was what was keeping all the air inside. Like with a balloon, you tied string around it to keep the air in, didn’t you? Yes, or you tied a knot in it.
And if the rope was very tight, then a person wouldn’t be able to undo it all by themself. Of course they wouldn’t. They’d need help.
William knew if it was him up in the tree, William up there with a rope around his neck so tight he couldn’t speak, then Daddy would get a ladder or a chair or something and climb up and help
him get the rope off his neck. There was a chair on the grass. One of the new chairs out of the kitchen, which wasn’t supposed to be outside. And it certainly wasn’t supposed to be kicked over in the grass. William righted it and climbed up on to the seat, but even when he stood on tiptoe he couldn’t reach higher than his father’s knees.
He ran down to the garden shed and pushed at the door. Locked. He went back to the house and got his mother’s stepladder from the laundry, set it up under the swaying feet of his father. The stepladder wasn’t firm on the lawn under the pear tree, it wobbled as he got higher. The top step of the ladder brought William’s head level with his father’s waist. Even if he stretched to his full height he couldn’t reach the rope. He would have to climb the tree itself, crawl out on the branch above his father’s head. Or, and a new bought came into his mind, he could climb up his father’s body. Sit on his shoulders like he used to before they went away- That was one of the things he missed when his mother took them away. Sitting on his daddy’s shoulders while his daddy pranced around on the grass. It felt like you could fall off any minute and really hurt yourself, but you knew that Daddy would never let you fall. So it was dangerous and safe all at the same time, made you squeal and laugh at the top of your voice.
William grasped hold of Daddy’s belt and kicked off. The stepladder clattered over on to the grass. The two of them swung from side to side together, and William wrapped his legs around Daddy’s waist. He pulled himself higher by grasping his father’s lapel, and eventually he got his foot onto the buckle of Daddy’s belt, and from there it was easy enough to get up to his shoulders. And easy to sit there as well, because he could hold the rope as well as his father’s head.
But he couldn’t loosen the rope. He couldn’t unpick the knots. Once William had managed to unpick a knot in his shoelaces, and that had been difficult, had taken him nearly an hour. But the knots on the rope around Daddy’s neck were much tighter than shoelace knots. It was going to be terribly difficult to untie knots like these. If shoelace knots took a whole hour, then knots like the ones around Daddy’s neck might take years and years and years.