How the Dead Live (Factory 3)

by Raymond, Derek

  I told him, and at the end of the recital the voice said, Christ.

  ‘So you see,’ I said, ‘the inside of this town looks like spaghetti junction, everything and everyone’s entwined with everything else; Mardy himself is only one factor.’

  ‘Yes, you’ve made yourself clear,’ said the voice, ‘you usually do, I’ll say that much. I don’t know what’s going on down in the country these days.’

  ‘I think they’ve been watching too much bad television,’ I said, ‘but within twenty-four hours I’ll at least be able to make plenty of arrests.’ I added: ‘Like six.’

  ‘Including this Inspector Kedward?’

  ‘Of course. I’ve got proof that he accepted bribes. So there’ll be him to stay, his wife for running a dishonest gambling club, Mardy, Dick Sanders for accepting money to deliver the dry ice knowing that he was helping to conceal a death, Walter Baddeley and his assistant Johnny Prince for extortion and blackmail. I might need help making the arrests,’ I added. ‘I can hardly lodge them in Thornhill police station, not under the circumstances.’

  ‘You sent the help back.’

  ‘No, that was a hindrance,’ I said. ‘I will not be told how to work a job by a man like Fox.’

  ‘You might have to face up to the fact that Bowman’ll come down,’ said the voice. ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘I do, though,’ I said. ‘If he does come down it’ll be because he can smell a headline in it. I’ll have cleared up all the shit; all he’ll have to do is make the arrests and cart them off, these people, then take the credit.’

  ‘I will not have you talking about your superiors in that way,’ said the voice. ‘I’ve warned you countless times.’

  ‘It’s the truth, though,’ I said, ‘you’ll see how it turns out.’

  ‘I’ve just made peace between you two,’ said the voice mournfully. ‘When I think of the trouble I went to.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have bothered,’ I said. ‘Peace can never last long between Charlie and me. In any case,’ I added, ‘I want Mardy left to me.’

  ‘Why?’ shouted the voice. ‘He kills his wife as the result of a series of illegal operations, conceals her death—’

  ‘He believes he had a reason to behave as he did, and I can follow it. I will not have him handed over to Bowman. Anyway I’ve made a deal with him.’

  ‘You had absolutely no right! The law—’

  ‘It was the truth I was after,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t that what we wanted?’

  ‘You’ll be telling me you’re sorry for Mardy next.’ ‘I am.’

  ‘We’re not in the pitying business,’ said the voice.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘and may God have mercy on us.’

  ‘There’s such a thing as police procedure, Sergeant.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Part of it’s called resigning.’

  ‘You’ll bloody well see this job through,’ the voice said.

  ‘Only on my terms, though. No one but me is to interfere with Mardy, understand?’

  ‘You’re the only low-ranking detective I’ve ever heard of who dared talk to a deputy commander like that.’

  ‘We might as well be clear,’ I said, ‘is it yes or no?’

  ‘I’ll have to think about it.’

  ‘Well, make up your mind,’ I said, ‘there isn’t much time left on this one.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ said the voice, ‘well, all right then. I really don’t know how I’m going to square it though. You know what Serious Crimes are like once they take an interest in A14 – they’re better budgeted, better equipped, better manned, and they’ve got their own folk upstairs to put the pressure on.’

  ‘You just find a way of holding that mob off Mardy for twenty-four hours,’ I said, ‘I don’t care what happens to anyone else. Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.’

  ‘Yes, but the trouble with you,’ said the voice, ‘is that no one else does.’

  ‘I have to solve these things my own way.’

  ‘Somebody told me you’ve got the press on it.’

  ‘One man,’ I said. ‘You know what it is, I feed them and they feed me.’

  ‘I suppose it’s that bloody man Cryer from the Recorder again, is it?’

  ‘He’s all right,’ I said.

  ‘You might as well go ahead and marry him, have done with it.’

  ‘You’re right in a way,’ I said. ‘I always protect my own, there aren’t many of them. So look after your end of it, but keep clear of Mardy.’

  ‘Why don’t you and I change jobs?’ said the voice.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and rang off.

  I went over to the tough-looking little armchair that stood in a corner of the room. It held its plastic elbows out to me like a wrestler, and the only way I could think of to get a submission was to sit down on it hard and have a drink. But I had barely had a chance to mix it when Cryer rang.

  ‘We were just talking about you,’ I said, ‘where are you ringing from?’

  ‘London, I had to go and see Angela.’

  ‘You think of Angela when you think of Mardy, OK?’

  ‘I had a talk with Mardy before I left, I ought to tell you.’

  ‘I should fucking well think so,’ I said, ‘I told you expressly not to do that. Well, anyway, how was he?’

  ‘Not good. All absent in his mind.’

  ‘You be careful how you play this,’ I said, ‘you meddling bastard, don’t you come on hard-boiled with me. What did you find out about Mrs Mardy?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Cryer. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you. Not now.’

  ‘This story’s beginning to make a noise where I work. The sort of noise we’re paid to make.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said, ‘nor do you. As long as I’m in charge of this case you’re the only reporter on it, and that’s for past favours and favours to come. But play it my way.’

  ‘She’s dead, this woman, isn’t she?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she’s dead.’

  ‘And the husband killed her.’

  ‘Yes, but it was no ordinary murder.’

  ‘I’ve got to know more than that.’

  ‘And you will, but not before tonight. Look, don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I keep telling you, no one’s going to get in ahead of you. But when you do get the facts, Tom, now you help me, damn you. Let’s have a little pity from the fourth estate – it won’t do your story any harm. I’ll tell you this much; yes, I’m going to do Mardy, I have to, but I’m equally going to make certain that he doesn’t do the full bitter trudge in a court of law.’

  ‘What are you asking me to do?’

  ‘Be kind, basically.’

  ‘I’ve got an editor who isn’t kind.’

  ‘Fix him,’ I said. ‘You can if you’ve a mind to. What you and he both want is to get in with it first and you will, but you’ll do it on my terms. Are you coming back down to Thornhill now?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good,’ I said, ‘because I might be going to need you.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but what about these other people? I’ve heard a rumour there’s even a local police officer involved down there.’

  ‘Where the hell do you people get these rumours from?’ I said.

  ‘All sorts of people talk,’ he said. ‘They’ve got tongues in their heads, haven’t they? Our job is just to listen.’

  ‘I told you earlier to fuck off, Tom,’ I said, ‘you didn’t listen. I told you to leave Mardy alone – and you’ve interviewed him.’

  ‘You trying to protect Mardy or what?’

  ‘That’s what I’m doing,’ I said. ‘The rest of the mob, you can go mad on that lot, but I will not have Mardy destroyed, either by us or by you, do you understand? Now will you play this by my rules or won’t you, it’s as simple as that.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Then get down here fast,’ I said, ‘and stand by, I’m on my own here. Tonight, if you and that edito
r of yours can hold yourselves in that long, it’ll all be finished, and you can start printing.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ he said. ‘Done.’

  I thought, ringing off, that Cryer had hardened up a lot since the McGruder days. But don’t we all get harder?

  24

  (Mardy had said to me: ‘Perhaps Marianne and I would have looked tawdry with the dawn now, the candles pale, exhausted; we would have gone out, looking old, to shiver on the terrace, waiting for next summer with the dead beside us. We would only have comforted ourselves with our music and memories, waiting for sunrise.

  ‘Slowly I am feeling my way towards the other line.’

  ‘What line is that?’ I said, and he answered: ‘It’s death, for the other night when I was cold and alone I pulled my blanket over me and half dreamed that I was in the small back bar of the pub behind the hospital where I trained. We were the same nine at our table; we used to drink beer and gossip. Somebody, Ian Richards, I think, cracked a joke and I said that’s really very funny but as I spoke I fell from my place, faint, knowing I had gone, falling against the stomach of a big man who was standing nearby, and I heard them say, he’s ill, but I was on the floor. It was too late; sound, voices, light had faded to nothing.

  ‘Then the man who always sat on the pavement to draw by the entrance to the pub was there again; he often appears in those dreams. He had no limbs but drew with coloured chalks between his teeth, the Houses of Parliament and London scenes.

  ‘I go down to be with Marianne in the night. She is always near me, I sense her arms tight round me in the evenings and feel her saying hush, quiet your tears, I’m alive in a different place now and would be in heaven if only you could join me. I tell her I’m just coming and by a breath not to shake a spider’s web she whispers, I’m always here for you, always, because you kept your word. She tells me there are streams, lands and cities better than on earth and says, I sing all the time now, remade and longing for you. We have to work the fields of heaven, she says, to produce a new seed; there’s much to do and we need you.’

  He gazed at me and said: ‘It sounds banal, the dialogue of bereavement, doesn’t it, but it isn’t. The power of imagination as well as of science is so great, that thanks to the engines of the brain and heart we create that life beyond death which we are sure must be possible for us.

  ‘Reality is to be questioned, not accepted. Matter dangles on a rail, drawn and dark like a curtain or an overdraft. Our state is an unending crisis and the invisible, crammed with errors, crashes through us. Defeated, broken, my ideas ridiculed, my beliefs punishable by law, I am in an impossible decline, going to the point where life and death squarely cross. Reason steers me to my end; nightly both hurry in against me between damp sheets. But I resist, knowing that life is a short fever.

  ‘And so power is crowned and uncrowned at a stroke, the change between trust and murder.

  ‘I have cost none of you anything. I want to be helped out of myself now, having been here long enough; I want to fly upwards as the white bird of death.

  ‘They will laugh at me in court; everything I have ever done or thought will look absurd. Yet I have been through hell.

  ‘I remember when I was young I went out one September morning into Kent between Maidstone and Rochester and walked through the woods; the leaves were just turning. It was nineteen forty-one; I was on leave. Under slowly gathering weather, vast clouds, I walked for miles, considering what beauty and eternity were, and if I could ever carry off their prize. At last I lay down by a stream near Holborough quarries with my sandwiches and beer – you know what it is, such happiness as is possible for us must be had at once. I still see that day; the world felt bright as a new penny, like 1500; I still smell the smoke from the fields where they were burning off the stubble. I stayed there dreaming until my watch told me that I had to go back to the war. So I got to a pub called The Duke Without A Head, where I was staying on my own, had an early supper, changed into uniform and took a taxi for the train. In that train I leaned out into the dusk as the carriage drew away round the curve from the station; I was filled with passion for all I had seen on my long walk; everything in the land I had seen seemed to me worth dying for, even as an army doctor. I had a case and gas-mask with me, I recall, also a thin book about love. I went on staring out at fields and towns increasingly obscured by night.

  ‘Ever since I have spent my time trying to struggle forward to where I can get into a position to think.’)

  (‘During my treatment of Marianne I realized that existence is much more serious than many of us suppose. Just before I carried out the operation on her for the tumour she suddenly took my head into her deep breast and sang to me for a while in the dark. I reassured her about her illness, but she only shook her head at me, that I had already shaved, and smiled and said to me, you’ve done all you could. I’ll always comfort you, she said, now never be afraid of love, and I said, the only fear I have of love is losing it and she whispered, that will never happen.’

  He was silent and then added: ‘It seems to me all the same that there’s nothing in my contract with existence that obliges me to live out every inch of it. I don’t know, perhaps I ought to rewrite my entire life, but I’ve no time now; forgive me.’)

  25

  They rang me from reception to say that a Mr Bowman and a Mr Fox wanted to see me in the lounge.

  I went down and walked across the spaces between empty sofas till I reached them where they were waiting at the back of the room. I said: ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I said to Fox: ‘You particularly. I already told you to get lost.’

  ‘Now don’t get cheeky,’ said Bowman, ‘watch your bloody tone.’

  ‘Get your little cocks out of my fundament,’ I said, ‘and everything’ll be OK.’

  ‘It’s orders I’ve got to try and be patient with you, Sergeant,’ said Bowman, and Fox sniggered.

  I turned to him and said: ‘You find me amusing, do you?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Fox smirked.

  I said: ‘You think that because you’re standing next to a chief inspector you’re running no risk, is that it?’

  ‘I suppose that’s right,’ said Fox.

  ‘You jaunty little man,’ I said, ‘wipe that smile off your face or I’ll smear it over a wall, now shut your boat.’ I said to Bowman: ‘Have you or your demon apprentice here touched this case at all?’

  ‘We’ve been up looking around,’ said Bowman, ‘yes.’

  ‘You’ve seen my man?’

  ‘It’s all quite in order,’ said Fox, laughing, ‘after all, we are police officers, and so what about it?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what about it, darling,’ I said. ‘If either of you have as much as sneezed on that man I will have your guts for a garter, now is that plain language or isn’t it?’

  Bowman said to Fox: ‘He’s always like this, Darenth.’

  ‘Oh Darenth,’ I said. ‘What a sweet pretty name.’

  ‘Just let him row himself deeper into the shit,’ Bowman said to Fox. ‘No need to get riled, I’ve had years of practice with this one.’

  I said: ‘Tell me what you have both been doing.’

  ‘Up your jumper,’ said Bowman, ‘we don’t have to tell you anything, you cheeky berk.’

  I said: ‘Have you found out where Mrs Mardy is?’

  Fox said: ‘We have.’

  I said: ‘How did you find out?’

  Bowman said: ‘We came down with a W, we did your work for you. I decided it was a serious crime. We went up, turned the place over, and found her OK.’

  ‘You dolts,’ I said, ‘and they call that detective work, just bomb straight in, never mind who gets hurt – what have you done to her?’

  ‘Never you fucking mind,’ said Fox, ‘this is for Serious Crimes from now on, we’ll take it from here.’

  ‘What did the husband do when you looked into that fridge?’ I said.

  ‘He came on a bit,’ said Fox, ‘and so fucking what?’

&n
bsp; ‘I’ll tell you fucking what,’ I said. I went over to him and hit him in the mouth so hard that I cut my knuckles open on his teeth. His problem was that he didn’t believe I was going to do it until it was too late; he went down like leaves in a hailstorm. I turned to Bowman and said: ‘OK, who’s next, do you feel like having a go? I’ll wreck that jacket for you if you like.’

  He didn’t fancy it. He went and examined Fox, squatting down to do it. He said to me: ‘You cunt, you have really hurt him.’

  ‘That’ll teach him to keep his mouth shut,’ I said. ‘I’ve told you before, Charlie – never, never interfere in my business. Your friend can lie wired up in hospital for a month or two and think about that.’

  ‘What a lot of fuss about a killer,’ said Bowman. ‘Just because we had the current cut off,’ he added. ‘You know you’re going to be disciplined over this, don’t you?’ ‘It won’t be the first time.’

  ‘No,’ said Bowman with satisfaction, ‘but it’ll be the last. I’ve finally got you. You wait and see the report I’m going to put in about this. You’re just a cunt, I’ve always told you that, and you deserve what’s coming to you the way a pork chop deserves apple sauce.’

  I said: ‘Never mind that. What state’s Mardy in now? This is one more time you won’t make superintendent, Charlie. I’m going to heat this up for you, and so is counsel when it comes to court.’

  ‘You swear against me in court,’ said Bowman, ‘and that’s your career completely fucked, I guarantee it.’

  ‘By the time this comes to court,’ I said, ‘I’ll doubtless no longer be a copper, so get stuffed.’

  ‘You certainly hit him all right,’ said Bowman, peering at Fox. ‘I’ll say that for you. Poor sod.’

  ‘My arsehole,’ I said.

  ‘You people in Unexplained Deaths are funny,’ said Bowman, ‘very funny. Anyone’d think you were on this murderer’s side.’

  ‘I am,’ I said. ‘But it’s too complicated for you, Charlie.’

  ‘You’re a fool,’ said Bowman. ‘Anyway, you’re a goner.’