He wouldn’t, though, but screamed ‘Hey! Mum!’
‘She won’t save you,’ I said, ‘come on, you little actor, what have you all been doing to Mrs Mardy? Tell me what you know – I don’t need any more of your sweet old country lies.’
Now the old bat leaned out through a cracked window upstairs. ‘Are you all right, my Dick?’ she crooned to him, ‘are you seeing to that nosy copper, my son? That’s right, my dear, I heard him sobbing, you see to him, you give him a right taste of it.’
Then she saw it was all the other way round.
‘You shitbag,’ she shouted down, ‘have you hit my boy?’
‘You bet your fat tits I will if I have to,’ I said.
‘Fuck the Mardys!’ she shouted, ‘and fuck you, my Dick was just a gardener.’
‘A laughing gardener,’ I said, ‘he giggled in the wrong place. He knows what I want to know over this business, and he knows that I know it. As for gardening, he wouldn’t know one weed from another unless he could roll it up and smoke it.’
‘You want him seen to, Dick?’ she screamed. ‘It’s easy done, I’ll get the banger to him now!’ Her shadow staggered back out of the light. Sanders moved to get up, but I pushed him backwards. ‘You’re dead,’ I said to him, ‘but not buried yet. You do exactly as I tell you and you’ll stay healthy, and not a moment longer.’
Old dreadnought was back at her window with a twelve-bore; I watched the barrels switch about in the half-dark, narrowing and shortening on us, the blue steel glinting from the bulb behind her as she tried to find the range. I took hold of Sanders and started dragging him out of the light, saying: ‘She’s going to fire, but let’s hope she’s too pissed. Let’s get into that barn, now come on, sweetheart, move, I want you living so you can speak to a court.’
‘All right,’ he muttered, ‘anything. I’m frightened of my mum when she’s got a gun in her hands.’
The old fool upstairs fused the bulb in the room with a blow from her furious head and there was no more light in the yard, but I could feel the twelve-bore aiming for me and I yelled, pushing Dick behind me: ‘You fire on a police officer, you old bag, and that’s the rest of your life gone rotten.’
‘I don’t fucking care!’ she shrieked, ‘you can both of you go and wank yourselves!’
I got Sanders into the barn doorway and was about to back in too when the first barrel went off. I like playing snooker and it wasn’t the right angle for the shot, but it was fucking near. It was full choke and took a lot of brick off the wall about five inches from my swede. The cold air filled with the smell of powder, and old straw suddenly flew about the place. When I got inside I said to Sanders: ‘That was nasty. Buckshot, that was.’
She heard me and yelled down: ‘Of course it’s buckshot, and it’s all for you, you pig.’
‘You’re wrecking the building, not us,’ I said, ‘so put that gun up and get lost, will you? You’re finished here, missis, I’ll see to it, now sleep on that.’ I peered at Sanders; he was white-faced and weeping. I was sorry for him now. I felt that we were all of us, without exception, filled with errors and that we knew it, yet had to live through them. It would have been better to be stupid, perhaps even mad. It’s the capacity of knowing that’s the real agony of existence; maybe we would all of us be more honest without knowledge. Yet it was a hall of mirrors: I had a job to do, and do fast in the allotted time, and I was as disturbed over the Mardys as I could ever be. I found I had some Kleenex on me and gave them to Sanders for him to wipe his face, finding rain water in a bucket and saying, are you all right, Sanders?
He looked at me and said: ‘You know Baddeley. I’ll tell you about Baddeley. You know he runs Thornhill?’
‘Yes.’
He sighed: ‘I feel bad at what I’ve done.’
‘What have you done?’
‘It’s as much what I’ve not done.’
‘Over Mrs Mardy?’
‘I wronged her.’
‘Was it money?’
‘Money,’ he breathed, ‘ah yes, money.’
‘Wronged her how?’
‘Wronged her memory, and for money. But when you haven’t any money then you have no memory.’
‘Look, we’re alone here, Dick,’ I said. ‘You can say anything you like, it’ll go no further than it would anyway, I swear.’
‘How far is that?’ he said.
‘That I can’t answer,’ I said. ‘The more I find out about the world by what I do, the more I see how much I don’t know.’
‘I got in the wrong hands,’ he said, ‘young broke people do, we’re used, and then we still have to pay. We pay the Baddeleys, we pay you coppers, why don’t people just finish us off, or better still not have us?’
I had no haven to offer him; in a way I was as helpless as he was. I was strictly bound by the terms of my inquiry into a disappearance, a suspected death. I had to grind on and live, even if I didn’t know why. My silly idea about absolute justice, I wonder if it’s not just an excuse so as to go on talking to people, continue on in the light so as not to have to die, go into the dark. How balance my interest against disinterest? But as a police officer I couldn’t possibly tell Sanders, not even my lover if I had one, any of that. And yet I saw Sanders in that vague light, in that barn, both of us fresh from that drunken fire, exhausted by the shock of it, and I knew by looking at his face that he was begging me, reaching to me for the one thing that I couldn’t give him – help. How alone we are! The one real risk we run is to understand our state: the rest are stupid smiling, cruel or uncaring people, all of them idiots, broken into the confused tragedy of a herd driven forward across hard country to be killed, and at a profit.
‘Don’t ask me if I’m all right if you can’t help me,’ he said. ‘You’d just be taking the piss, I couldn’t stand more jail.’
‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘This has all turned out to be very serious, and I’m in as tight a corner as you are because I have to find out about Mrs Mardy’s fate, and also those responsible for it. If we people didn’t do it, it would really be as if folk died for nothing, might as well never have lived, and then there’d be no such thing as civilization left at all.’
‘I’d never thought of it like that,’ he said, very white and tired, ‘never had such an idea in my life at all.’
‘You’re exhausted,’ I said, ‘you must get some proper sleep.’
‘I seem to have suddenly changed,’ he said, ‘I can’t tell how, but I can’t go back up to sleep in the house now after what’s passed, my mum’d kill me. Anyway I’m better now and don’t feel like sleeping, I’d rather go out and wander while I think.’
I knew what he meant; I often did the same. But I said: ‘It’s no good, I can’t let you do that just yet. Whatever my feelings are I must get an answer to this case, and you’re a key to it; I’m also in a hurry because I’m being hard pushed from London.’
‘I can’t do a deal with the law,’ he said, ‘that’s flat. It would get me killed.’
‘You’ll have to,’ I said, ‘you’ve no choice. I want to keep all this in my own hands; I don’t want you passed over to other officers I know. But the problem for you is, you’ll have to talk.’
‘But I’m afraid.’
‘I know,’ I said, lighting us both a Westminster, ‘but we’re all afraid. Best thing I could do for you is to arrest you for your own good and put you somewhere where you’d be safe but the trouble is I’ve nowhere to put you; I don’t like the police stations out here.’
‘You know about Kedward?’
‘It’s what I feel about him so far. But feeling can turn out to be fact.’
Sanders said: ‘Christ what a mess this is.’ He put his head in his hands and groaned with despair: ‘And I thought it was going to be so easy.’
‘What did you think was going to be so easy?’
‘Making the money.’
‘Money for doing what?’
‘Up at the Mardys last year.’
‘Wha
t did you do up there?’
‘It started with me reporting on them.’
‘Reporting to who? Baddeley?’
‘Yes.’
‘How much did you get paid?’
‘A thousand down, cash, for a gardening job – I thought, this is wicked this is, it’s fantastic, Christ, a thousand quid? Of course I had to watch on them. That’s how I knew madam was so sick. Sick?’ He tried to vomit.
‘And then what?’
‘It was the electricity strike last September, and the doctor came to Baddeley for some dry ice.’
‘Oh? Dry ice what for?’
‘It wasn’t to make ice cream,’ he said bitterly. ‘What do you think it was for?’
‘There are very few answers to that,’ I said, ‘and I find all of them far out. Is she up there?’
‘I don’t know for sure,’ he said, ‘but I think so. I helped deliver this ice and I see now I was in something too deep for me. If and when it comes to court wouldn’t you put a word in?’
‘I might if I can get a few more words out of you,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Let’s try this one. Was Mardy being blackmailed over this dry ice?’
‘Yes. Baddeley was doing it through a firm called Wildways Estates.’
‘What a pretty name,’ I said, ‘and how did the trick work?’
‘Mardy paid the cheques to Wildways, and that was a way for Baddeley to try and kosher them – you know, lose them so they wouldn’t show in his accounts.’
‘Laundered cheques,’ I said, ‘dirty laundry, it’s nothing but cheques in this bloody business. Still, it’s lucky how stupid these people are just when they think they’re being so clever, I’m always telling folk. All right now again – where the hell is Mrs Mardy? Do you know?’
‘That I can’t tell you,’ he said, ‘and that’s straight up, but I tell you I’m sure she’s up there at Thornhill Court somewhere.’
‘Can’t you tell me any more than that?’
‘I would if I could,’ he said, ‘I swear it.’ He swallowed and said: ‘Aren’t I being any use to you?’
‘Some,’ I said, ‘not much.’
‘Look, over me, be human, will you?’
‘That depends,’ I said, ‘it’s no real part of my job. My job is to help put an end to this case. It’s a snake I must spike and kill.’
‘Try and see it my way,’ said Sanders. ‘I’m twenty-seven with no future – I probably never had one, I was fucked before I got off the ground. Look at this shit-heap. We barely eat here, and the troubles we’ve got are enough to cut your appetite even if you had food in the fridge. Landlord’s solicitors working to get us out, no money for the rent. If not it’s trouble with you lot, or else it’s the council and trouble with the rates, trouble and thunder everywhere. I tell you I wouldn’t mind if there was a way out. But I can’t see one so I thieve because I must live, I’ve got to find a way. There’s Mum and her bottle on one hand, idiot out in the yard on the other, then there’s four more like me with two of them doing bird. The sun never shone on me; I was born to be screwed.’
I knew what he meant; I knew that no matter how much music you played in the motor it could never drown out your trouble, all the trouble of your state.
‘They say our family was respectable down here once,’ he said. ‘Farm labourers, a reputation my grandad slaved his guts out to build, but that’s all finished now. I’d still just like to work, settle down and marry like normal folk do. But there’s no work for a half-skilled man in Thornhill now. It’s not as if we were breaking the law when you take us away; there is no law in Thornhill, only the big villains we try to copy. You people are pissing in the wind when you send us down, and it’s not as though all of you were honest either. Bent or straight, it makes no difference to the hours you do, but at least you know you’ll draw a month’s wages. Only you try getting up at six in the morning without a penny to go plodding out in any weather on foot, hitching down this lane, hacking up that one, going to farms in the season and pulling your hair saying ’scuse me, missis, just looking for work, I’ll tackle anything, and all she says is sorry, we’re not hiring right now but here’s fifty p. Fifty p, hardly enough to buy you half a pint to drown in. Listen, I’ve got a bird you know and we really get on, only her dad drives a truck for a firm down in Thornhill and they’ve got savings, which puts them in a different class straight away from me. Sally’s dad? Christ, he and his old woman wouldn’t give me the skin off their shit. What, me, with three years’ bird behind me? What would they want their only girl to marry an ex-con for? So what they say is, you come round here again looking for Sally, cunt, and it’s guaranteed birdshot right there where you plant it, darling, now fuck off. So all we can do is go off and be happy with a cassette-player I’ve got and dance to beer in hedges and screw in ditches and that’s our marriage, stars crossing overhead when there are any, and they call that a summer wedding down here because summer’s short. I don’t know whether we’re the new poor or if it was always old; the difference is that they don’t recognize us any more the way they did in the old days. There’s no solidarity here any more, just your own hell; yes, it’s wicked, man.’
‘I’ll do everything I can,’ I said, ‘but you know I’ve got my own folk upstairs to think about.’
‘I know that,’ he said, whereupon I walked straight out of that barn door shouting up to the woman like a fool: ‘You’ve got the other barrel, use it, now’s your chance.’
Nothing happened. ‘Will you be all right?’ I whispered to Sanders in that freezing dark.
‘I’ve got my brother Brad,’ he said, ‘down in town, he’ll look after me.’
Even the idiot had gone, and the house was as lightless as we are in a state of disaster or sleep.
I said to Sanders: ‘Contact me if you’re in bother, but I’d better tell you that we’re short-handed, there’s only me.’
‘Considering who you are and what you do,’ he said, ‘I think you’re all right.’
‘None of us are ever all right,’ I said. ‘We’re all just waiting for the death express.’
12
The clerk at the hotel was absorbed in the new issue of Dare, but he dropped it under the desk when he saw me coming (as if I cared what he read). He didn’t look pleased to see me, but some people never are.
‘Any messages?’
‘Yeah, there’s all this lot,’ he grumbled, pushing it at me. ‘Hey, look, we’re not an answering service here, you know.’
‘Any good citizen’s always anxious to help the police,’ I said.
‘Yeah but there’s a limit to it. There’s been nothing but messages, more messages and still more messages since you got here, and this is supposed to be the slack season.’
‘And I’ll bet it’s the one you like best. And aren’t you bloody lucky, because there’s never any slack season for me.’
‘Why can’t you just do the whole lot through the police station?’ he moaned.
‘Because I don’t want to,’ I said, ‘and that’s all you need bother about.’
He turned his pair of hopeless eyes up at the ceiling and said, ‘Is it all going to take long?’
‘It’ll take as long as it takes,’ I said, ‘and think this over – I’d go to exactly the same amount of trouble if it was you who had disappeared.’
I went upstairs, sat down on the bed, took my shoes off and looked at the top message. It was an order to ring the voice, so I rang it.
‘At last,’ it said. ‘What the hell are you doing down there? Have you found out anything about this Mardy woman yet?’
‘A good deal, yes.’
‘Like what?’
‘That’s bad grammar, sir.’
‘As long as you understand it,’ said the voice, ‘my grammar’s good enough. Well?’
‘To start with, the husband’s been blackmailed over her.’
‘What for? Who by?’
‘I’ve got the name, but I need some checking done into some banking transactions
.’
‘Oh, not more banking.’
‘Banking and vanishing are often very closely linked,’ I said, ‘you know that as well as I do. Anyway you can take it that it’s to do with this voyage that the man says his wife went off on.’
‘Will you try and be a little clearer?’ said the voice. ‘What sort of a voyage was it? Sea? Air? Rail? Have you tried tracing the ticket?’
‘It was the kind of voyage you don’t need any ticket for. Last autumn Mardy took delivery of a load of dry ice, and you know what you use that stuff for.’
‘Yes, corpses,’ said the voice. ‘Let me think, dry ice will freeze them right down to—’
‘And where do you get it from?’
‘It’s not easy – the morgue, I suppose.’
‘Yes. Or?’
‘I don’t know – wait – an undertaker’s, maybe.’
‘Now we’re getting there,’ I said, ‘an undertaker’s. Exactly.’
‘Stop flourishing your logic in my ear,’ said the voice, ‘will you? Anyway, this woman’s dead, is that it?’
‘You can be one hundred per cent sure of that,’ I said. ‘You don’t need to freeze the living.’
‘Where’s the body, then? Anywhere near you?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘Why do you think so?’
‘Because I’ve got a witness – a lad who helped deliver the dry ice. He’s a no-hoper in his twenties with three years’ form called Dick, or Richard Sanders. He’s an accessory to murder, of course, when we find the body, because even counsel with L-plates on could prove that Sanders knew what that delivery was and what it was for.’
‘But why would the man want to freeze his wife?’
‘That’s the part I don’t know yet, but I’ll find out if I do it my way. Sanders also, on his own admission, says he received a thousand quid cash for his part in the job and what’s more, he worked for the Mardys over the period that interests us as a gardener.’
‘Sounds as if he’s in trouble,’ said the voice, ‘people like that always are. Have you arrested him?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Firstly because it doesn’t suit me to just yet and secondly because I’ve nowhere to put him.’
How the Dead Live (Factory 3) Page 11