I told him the number.
‘That somehow rings a bell,’ he said.
‘It ought to.’
‘Oh well, never mind,’ he said. He yawned. ‘Any profession?’
‘You bet,’ I said. I dropped my warrant card on his desk. ‘You can see what profession.’
An extremely long silence followed. To end it I said to the sergeant: ‘Your apprentices here have really got their goolies tangled up in the high wire this time, eh, Sarge?’
‘Why the fuck didn’t you tell us?’ yelled the driver.
‘Because I’m in the business of extracting information,’ I said, ‘not volunteering it.’
‘Let’s all keep calm, shall we?’ said the desk sergeant.
‘You can screw the calm,’ I said. ‘I may well bring a charge against these officers, in that they knowingly made and preferred against me and conspired to ma ke a false drink-and-drive charge against me.’ I said to them: ‘Now bring me that kit I blew into, and double.’
‘You’ve got to realize,’ said the desk sergeant, ‘these are my men.’
‘I realize that all right,’ I said, ‘and I don’t give a fuck about it, so you’d better put your weight behind me, otherwise it’ll be your head on a plate too, and new jobs aren’t so easy for old men to find in these hard times.’
‘All right,’ said the desk sergeant. ‘Get it, the pair of you, and snap it up.’
They trooped out and were gone for a while. When they did come back the one called Ben said: ‘Sorry, Sarge, but I’m afraid it got trodden on on the way in.’
‘Well that’s that then, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I like it better than an outright confession.’
The desk sergeant said: ‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘But you take bloody good care that none of you ever do a thing like that again. Now get both these artists out of here, there must be something for them to do other than warming their arses on a yellow line.’
‘OK,’ said the sergeant, ‘there’s the report of a fight come in over at 10, Wakefield Road, so get out there the two of you and create some peace, now move.’
At the door the driver turned to me and said: ‘You’re a right bastard, you are.’
‘I prefer me to you,’ I said.
‘Christ, you must be fun to work with, that must be really amusing.’
‘It wouldn’t be if anyone did, sonny,’ I said, ‘however nobody does, and looking you two over I like it better that way. Now do what your boss tells you, jump on your bike, remember you’re a public servant the same as everyone else in here and don’t take the piss, otherwise it’ll be your head next, now get out of here.’
When they had gone the desk sergeant said: ‘All right, now what are you down in Thornhill for?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ I said. ‘What do you think?’
‘The Mardy business?’
‘Well of course it’s the Mardy business,’ I said. ‘A few syrup of figs have started to get on back to front over this. What I want to do right away is see Inspector Kedward.’
‘Well you can’t,’ said the desk sergeant, ‘he isn’t here.’
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Is it his night off or somethmg?’
‘I’m spelling him.’
‘Get him on the phone, can’t you?’
‘I’ve instructions not to, unless it’s really urgent.’
I said: ‘Listen. You can take it from me that if overworked detectives from A14 get sent down from the smoke to a little rattrap like this, it’s for something the brass thinks is urgent.’
‘Inspector Kedward didn’t consider the Mardys urgent.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘but your Chief Constable does, and that’s all that need concern muddleheads like you and me.’
‘Why don’t you get on to him then?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said, ‘and don’t take the piss. Now get your inspector on the phone.’
‘I wouldn’t know where to reach him, not at this time of night.’
‘You mean he hasn’t got a home to go to?’
When the sergeant gazed down at his desk without speaking I said: ‘What you mean is, at this time of night he’s seldom there. OK then, is he married?’
‘Of course.’
I didn’t myself see why of course but I said: ‘All right, well then get Mrs Kedward on the line for me then, else leave a message, or do I have to do it myself?’
‘Doesn’t matter which of us does it,’ he said, ‘you won’t reach her, she won’t be at home either.’
‘Hardly seems much point in having a detective-inspector here at all quite frankly,’ I said, ‘does there, if he’s never on the job.’
‘He’s here in the daytime.’
‘Yes but the trouble is,’ I said, ‘that a good many things that should interest detective-inspectors happen at night.’ I planted my elbows on the desk and put my nose up close to his. I said: ‘Now listen, are you telling me the truth, or are you covering up for your inspector?’
‘I tell you I’m standing in for him,’ he said neutrally. ‘Nobody said you was coming, otherwise doubtless he’d have waited here to see you.’
‘Nobody said I was coming,’ I said, ‘because I didn’t say so myself, I like it better that way. I find detective work depends on being sudden at times and that’s me, do you see? Sudden.’
‘Very impressive,’ he said. ‘I’m flabbergasted by it.’
‘I don’t think you quite understand,’ I said. ‘I’ll put it this way. The more you don’t tell me right answers to what I want to know, the more I start to suspect – and as another police officer I’d better remind you straight off, you be careful you don’t pot the wrong colour on this one, darling. Because if you do you could lose the whole of this frame fast and find yourself out on your ear with a pension worth five times fuck all. Now your best course is to start telling me what I want to know immediately, otherwise I’ll dig it up by myself in which case God help you, are you reading me? It’s London that wants the answer to this Mrs Mardy business fast, and I mean very fast. I’ve got a firework up my arsehole from my folk, and that means I’m going to have to put one up yours, it’s called self-help, all right?’
When he didn’t answer me at all but looked stubbornly down at his blotter I said: ‘You really are giving me a dreadful pain, you are. I haven’t a hundred years to deal with this but about two days, three at the most. I’ve got a stack of work on back where I come from, I’ve no time for your sweet old country ways. You’re either straight or you’re bent, copper – I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt for the time being and assume you’re straight. In that case, if you won’t talk about Kedward leave him to me; tell me about the Mardys instead.’
He stared at me for a long time and said in the end: ‘My name’s Turner.’ He opened a drawer in the desk and got out a flask of Bell’s. ‘By the neck,’ he said, ‘I’ve no glasses. Does that suit you, Mr fucking London man?’
‘It’ll do,’ I said. I picked up the bottle and took a good drink out of it.
He did the same and said: ‘We might finish this bottle, if you’re in the mood.’
‘Watch your inspector doesn’t catch you at it,’ I said as he drank, ‘you on duty and everything.’
‘There’s no fear of that.’ We were getting on better now.
‘I’m in the mood to finish your scotch,’ I said, ‘but you tell me about these Mardys.’
‘I’m Mr Kedward’s man, don’t threaten me.’
‘I’m not in the threatening business,’ I said, ‘I’m in the inquiry business.’ I added: ‘You don’t like detectives, do you?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘frankly, they stink.’
‘I’m sorry to hear you say it.’
‘I’ve seen worse than you,’ said Turner, ‘but to me a proper police officer goes in uniform, he’s not afraid to be seen in it. I don’t like it when they go skulking around in shabby clothes like you.’
�
��No more than I like it when I see you sitting around here not clearing up the business of a woman disappeared from right under you,’ I said.
He had a drink; it took him some time. Then he said: ‘Old family here, the Mardys.’
‘How old?’
‘They came over here with Charles II in sixteen sixty and been here ever since.’
‘What’s the house like?’
‘Burned down and rebuilt in 1860. It’s a ruin now, though, and that’s putting it mildly.’
‘Have they got money?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t think so. Anyway, not now.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘so now what about Mrs Mardy?’
‘We never called her that in Thornhill,’ he said. ‘We used to call her madam because she was French; it was the nearest we could get to the French, which of course we can’t pronounce at Thornhill. It was to her face we called her madam, but among ourselves we always called her by her name, Marianne. She was beautiful, but what was more, she had a wonderful singing voice and gave concerts in the house; Dr Mardy used to accompany her on the violin. Anyone from the town was welcome, and afterwards there would be wine and sandwiches in the hall under the organ; the girls would come in and help her with the sandwiches, and some of the men would bring a bottle. It started small as things do, but in the end people would come a long way to hear and watch them. They were great evenings as long as it didn’t rain in. People you never might have thought would be interested used to come – people from as far off as Birmingham and Oxford, London even. Then, after she had finished singing, she would come down with the doctor off their makeshift stage, the doctor with his violin in his hand and an arm round her waist and she joking and laughing with everyone, sometimes trying out a new song in a corner with someone while we ate and drank. Oh yes, they were wonderful evenings, they were, wonderful – people got together and talked, quite like old times, much better than watching the match on the telly. I tell you, we’re no great lovers of the French here, but she really won us over with the songs of her own land and ours, and I tell you that hall was packed, packed it was. People wanted to give money sometimes but she would never accept it; she said, give it to something important, like the cancer fund. Yes, yes, with her character she wiped out all prejudice, she was so kind and natural. You know if I shut my eyes I can hear her singing now and see the doctor behind her, his face bent over his bow as they changed key. They did love each other. Some people only came to jeer at them but you can be sure they never stayed long, because Marianne and the doctor had gained our deep respect here at Thornhill.
‘When I think back towards the last concerts they gave you could see right across society in that hall; the whole of our people was somehow there, all joined in their music. You take me for a sentimental idiot, but it was beautiful; I love good music, true music. Sometimes, carried away herself by what she was singing, she would reach out to us all with her arms, smiling radiantly, and then at the end wave as though she were saying goodbye, saying remember me.
‘No, I never missed a single one of her concerts, and I can think of dozens like me.’
‘What do you think’s happened to her now?’
He didn’t reply at once, but took another drink and then said: ‘I think she’s most probably resting with the doctor up at the house; she hasn’t been well for a long while.’
‘How long?’
‘I’d say a good year.’
‘You believe she’ll come back?’
‘Come back?’ he said. ‘Marianne? Of course she’ll come back.’
‘There are people that doubt it.’
‘I can’t help that,’ he said obstinately. ‘If anything had happened to her we would have known.’
‘I wish life were that simple,’ I said. ‘I’ve been in my disgusting game for years. It hardly ever smells of lilac and I can tell you, it doesn’t this time. This Mrs Mardy’s not been seen for six months, six months, and people are worried for her, don’t you see? Worried enough to have me come down.’
‘She’s got the doctor to look after her. He’s her husband. He loves her.’
‘Six months’ disappearance can mean eternity.’
‘No, no,’ said Turner, ‘I tell you, she’s just resting up at the house.’
I said: ‘It’s late, but I think I’ll just get in touch with the Chief Constable.’
‘You can’t,’ said Turner, ‘he’s in hospital, he’s had a stroke.’
‘You’re seriously undermanned around here,’ I said.
6
I was booked into Quayntewayes and lay down on the bed in Room 21. After a while I put out the light and stared at the uncurtained windows; presently I began to smell dead flowers. There was a bad photograph of Marianne Mardy in the file I had and in the darkness of my head I reviewed it, going over her laughing features one by one and adding to them everything I had just learned about her. It wasn’t easy for me to fix her face in my mind because in the photograph the face was blurred; the camera had moved. However, I could see that although she was not beautiful as the cinema thinks of beauty, there was a tenderness in her eyes which was its own beauty. She was in a garden, dressed in old clothes, a skirt and jumper, and running her hand through her hair; she was looking as if towards someone out of shot – her husband, surely. It wasn’t the first time I had smelled dead flowers – they were always the same flowers, chrysanthemums, and every time I smelled them it meant that somebody was dead.
I fell for a time into a mood, not sleep, until I found that I was murmuring words so old that I couldn’t think for a time where I had heard them, but in the end recalled them as Spenser’s, verses of his that I had learned at school:
‘She fell away in her first age’s spring,
While yet her leaf was green, and fresh her rind,
And while her branch fair blossoms forth did bring
She fell away against all course of kind;
For age to die is right, but youth is wrong;
She fell away like fruit blown down with wind.’
I felt myself in that hotel room, prosaic as it was, racked by sorrow, and in the half-dark was aware of arms opening spontaneously to me. I remembered those words of hers that Turner had cited: I am Marianne, remember me. Spenser continued:
‘Yet fell she not as one enforced to die,
Nor died with dread and grudging discontent,
But as one toiled with travel down doth lie;
So lay she down as if to sleep she went,
And closed her eyes with careless quietness.’
I had a dream sometime in the night. My mad wife Edie and I were walking through the outskirts of a foreign city, going away from it. There was an atmosphere of terror and sadness everywhere, also an ominous silence broken only by the sound of shuffling feet. We walked into a corner grocer’s shop to buy food. The big woman who served us said: ‘This used to be the administrative part of the city,’ and added: ‘I’m shutting up shop after you. Everyone’s leaving, those that haven’t already left.’ When I asked her why, she laughed and answered ‘Murder,’ and turned off into a corner. I packed what we had bought into a bag we had with us and then we walked back out on to the boulevard we had been following before. People, thousands of them, were hurrying down it, all going in the same direction as ourselves. I wanted to try to reason out why we were doing the same, but couldn’t seem able to. At fifty-yard intervals bodies were lying against the walls. A man in a business suit had collapsed under a sack of cabbages; further on an old man in rags sprawled on a toppled heap of garbage cans; he was dying. A monk in a brown habit stood beside him, holding a syringe; near them stood a shabby woman in her forties, wringing her hands as the crowd went past her, repeating the same unintelligible phrase over and over. No one took any notice of her; they hurried on, heads bent, walking swiftly away from the city centre. Neither Edie nor I spoke to each other – face shut inwards, lips pursed, she moved so fast that I had trouble keeping up with her
. We just had Edie’s handbag and a case each. I knew we were going on a very long journey that we would never repeat and that like the others we would fall when we could no longer go on. I didn’t know where we had come from, or why, or where we were going.
I must have picked Edie up from the asylum at Banstead, for when I looked closely at her I saw there was something very wrong with her clothes. She had stout black shoes on and a rubber bib showed under her coat.
7
I drove over to the police station at seven in the morning and walked into the reception area; there was a different sergeant on the desk. I asked where Kedward’s office was and he told me, adding: ‘He’s expecting you.’
I went in and said to the inspector: ‘I’ll identify myself.’
‘Don’t bother,’ he said sourly, ‘I’ve had a phone call over you.’
‘You know what it’s about then.’
‘The Mardy business – Christ, what the hell does London have to worry about that for?’
‘You don’t find it unusual, Mrs Mardy having gone missing for six months?’
‘They’re just a couple of middle-aged eccentrics.’
‘I see – not worth troubling about then.’
He said: ‘Watch your tone.’ He looked dull, was about ten years older than me, and had a thin face. His wrinkled suit looked wiser than its owner; the material was a light, bitter shade of grey, and it seemed to know what it had coming to it – early retirement from Thornhill, end of line. He said: ‘Have you been up to see Mardy yet?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I want the background down in the town first, I only got here last night.’
‘Background?’ he sneered. ‘Some of you junior officers want to get your bloody skates on.’
‘Mind out when I do,’ I said, ‘I go far and fast.’
He laughed: ‘Convince me.’
‘I will,’ I said. I could tell Kedward and I were never going to get on. ‘Meantime I’d like to hear anything you can tell me about the Mardys.’
How the Dead Live (Factory 3) Page 5