The Fat of Fed Beasts

by Guy Ware

  It isn’t Pitt, though, is it, Mr Loss Adjuster?

  I have to admit he has me there, Pitt being the name I had given him, the name on the card, although of course, I don’t admit it. Not aloud. Instead I say, How long does this take? And he says it is up to me. He picks up the tray and leaves. I stay sitting at the table, because there does not seem to be anything else to do.

  I have never met Lopez, know nothing about him beyond his reputation. Kurt can’t have met him, either, that much is obvious, or he couldn’t have mistaken me for him. But that isn’t the point. Kurt knows about Lopez. He connected Lopez to me, because I said I was Pitt, that I was a loss adjuster. Unless I simply look like Lopez? It is just possible. There are cases, I believe. Unrelated people who look uncannily alike. But surely someone would have mentioned it before now? Theo would have said something. Unless Theo has not met Lopez, either? Ridiculous. Theo has been around since long before the Ark. He and Lopez would have met at Riverside House. There are others, too. Old timers like Jackson and Rivers. I have never met Jackson, either. Or Rivers. It is a big company; I can’t expect to meet everybody. Not even the bigwigs. Especially not the biggest wigs, the originators, the people whose idea the Office was and whose exploits form our founding myths. Jackson and Rivers – and Lopez – have no time for me. They have bigger fish to fry. Why does Kurt think I’m Lopez? Because I am a loss adjuster. Which means that he knows that Lopez is a loss adjuster, too, and that he was expecting him. But how has Kurt even heard of Lopez?

  The answer must be Rodkin, but it is not much of an answer.

  I stand up. The view doesn’t improve, and I sit down again. The chair is hard, plain wood. Hanging from the back of the chair, the collar of my jacket is creased where I have leaned against it. It is easy to say I don’t care, but I don’t. Actually, it is not always easy. Not caring – about jackets, obviously, but about other, larger things, too – has been the closest I have come to aspiration. I crave disinterest. Is that a joke? An oxymoron? I hope not, but hope is one of the things I seek to do without. That and aspiration.

  When I met Rada . . . what? What has that to do with anything?

  If Rodkin slit his throat there must be blood somewhere here, however thoroughly it has been cleaned. Some stain in the carpet or on the cork tiles to mark his passage. I stand up. I lift the small table and carry it across the room. I place it upside down on the bed, and then put the chair on top of it. I have cleared as much of the floor as I can. I walk to the corner furthest from the door, the corner to the right of the bay window, and I get down on my knees. I begin to examine the carpet, one square at a time, moving right to left across the room. I find several stains, some of which may be blood, but they are old and dark: ingrained – almost part of the fabric of the carpet. When I reach the bed, I turn, and work my way back from left to right. If I move the bed now I will only have to move it back again. And if I keep moving things backwards and forwards every time I cross the room, there is always the chance that I will make a mistake, and miss a patch. Even if I don’t, there will have been that chance, and I will never know whether I have looked everywhere. No, my plan is to examine everywhere else, and then to move the bed. That way I can be sure. Back by the wall to the right of the window – if you are facing the window – I find a small hole in the skirting. Actually, it is more of a gap. For ten centimetres there is no skirting, just rough lime plaster painted the same shade of tangerine as the woodwork to either side. Perhaps it had been cut out to accommodate some piping, or box work around piping, long since removed? The hole is in the centre of the gap, at the lower edge where the wall meets the floor. The edges of the hole are coarse-grained and irregular. It is just big enough to put two fingers through together, if one wanted, but no more. I decide not to. It is probably some rodent’s home. If Kurt brings me an apple for my lunch – I am sure Kurt will return with lunch – I will leave the core by the hole, and observe what happens. I may make a companion in my incarceration. Kurt may even bring cheese. Hope springs eternal – the bastard. I return to my scrutiny of the carpet, but I am not much more than two-thirds through – not even counting the area under the bed – before I give in. I stand up, feeling suddenly giddy from the change in altitude. There is no doubt that Rodkin’s blood was spilled; finding it will make no difference. I am a loss adjuster, not a forensic scientist. The fact of Rodkin’s death is not in dispute; the manner of it may have some bearing on my recommendation, but the position or the pattern of the stains is irrelevant. I lift the chair from the bed and put it back where it was, then do the same with the table. Then I sit down.

  11

  THE TROUBLE WITH corruption is that you have to corrupt someone, and then they know. From the moment the envelope crosses the table, the moment the promotion goes to the man who doesn’t deserve it, from the first scratch on the back that comes with a promissory note, from that first moment you and he are in this thing together, bound closer than any marriage. You might appear to hold the power. You might have the money or the patronage he seeks, but, from the moment you grant his wish, he knows what you have done. He has seen who you are, and that is never comfortable.

  I was about to use half a million pounds of other people’s money to buy a name. Put that way it sounds ridiculous: extravagant, exorbitant. But perhaps Gerald was right. Perhaps we really did need to complete the digital security project, given all the time and money we had sunk in it already. Given that it might stop people doing what I’d just had Gerald do. Perhaps. It would mean cuts elsewhere, more redundancies down the line, but perhaps it would be money well spent anyway. Who knows? The fact is, when it is all over, when a career is done, nobody looks back and adds these things up for you.

  When I asked, Gerald didn’t bat an eyelid. At least, I don’t imagine he did: on the telephone it was hard to be sure. Certainly, he did not hesitate, or make the mistake of asking why I wanted to know. We both knew that was not a question I would have answered.

  Now, on Wednesday morning, I stood by the window, looking at the view I was going to lose the following day. Karen stuck her head around the door to say that Gerald’s PA said he was working on it and would two this pm be OK? I was disappointed but it would have to do. There was no real urgency.

  “Oh, and DI Jenks is outside.”

  “Bernie?”

  “I know. It’s not a network meeting. Shall I get rid of him?”

  Bernie, Moody and I had agreed from the start that we would only meet for scheduled Losers’ Groups. It wasn’t as if we were friends, or even colleagues. As far as the rest of the force was concerned, we were simply people thrown together by the casual brutality of Human Resources. But I was leaving the next day: nobody was watching what I did now. Nobody was interested.

  “Send him in.”

  Karen was surprised, but she wasn’t going to let it worry her. She showed Bernie in without using his rank again, without a word, in fact, just a nod of the head.

  Bernie looked worse than usual. Even when he laughed – even when he was celebrating our first haul, throwing fistfuls of tens and twenties at Moody, even when he was bitching about her to me afterwards, about how she was actually a bit scary – he always had something of the depressed and elderly Basset hound about him. That’s just the way Bernie was, and I never thought it meant too much. But now he looked worse, as if since yesterday he’d had far too much whisky and too little sleep, and what sleep he’d had was on a park bench. His beard was more matted than ever in the places where it grew thickly; more ragged where it didn’t. Yesterday he’d been chortling in his joy because we hadn’t killed anybody after all, and now he wasn’t.

  I said, “What is it, Bernie?”

  He crossed the room and planted himself wordlessly in a chair in front of my desk. He sank his face in his hands. I turned from the window to sit in my own chair, bringing myself down to Bernie’s level.

  Bernie lowered his hands and raised his face. T
he rims of his eyes were red, the pouches beneath them dark and heavy. He said, “She was lying.”

  “Who was?”

  “Moody. Detective Constable Rachel Moody. She lied to us. When she said nobody was dead.”

  He meant in the bank, of course. There were dead people everywhere, all the time. People die. He meant the woman in the bank.

  “How do you know this?”

  “Proctorow told me.”

  There was no reason I should know the name, but I felt a faint tug of recognition. The force employed fifty thousand people, one way or another. But the name Proctorow meant something.

  Bernie said, “He was my DS on the thing that went all tits-up and got me shoved into HR. I picked him for that job. He could have been a good detective.”

  I remembered the case. There’d been a lot of talk about it at the time. Bernie had taken the fall. Proctorow had been pushed off murders, but the consensus was he was lucky to have a job at all.

  Bernie said, “Bob Proctorow did most of the work, got us onto the guy in the first place.”

  “The one who got off on appeal?”

  Bernie gave me the look again, the one that said I wouldn’t understand. “The one with friends.”

  I managed not to laugh. “In high places?”

  Bernie nodded. He wasn’t laughing.

  “How high?”

  “Guess.”

  Bernie was never going to accept that he might have caught the wrong man. I decided I might as well call his bluff. “The Commissioner?”

  “Higher.”

  I shook my head. There was no one higher than the commissioner.

  Bernie said, “Your boss.”

  This time I did laugh. I couldn’t help it. “Angela?”

  Bernie was still serious. “It was before her time.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “You mean Eddie?”

  Bernie said nothing.

  Eddie Likker wasn’t a policeman. He was an accountant. Like me. Only better, obviously. It was Likker who gave me a job, Likker who promoted me. I might say he was like a father to me, but it was better than that: I liked Eddie. My father wanted me to find a job I loved. Eddie would have laughed at that. He said you did what you had to: love didn’t come into it. He’d retired three years ago; he died last month. At his funeral there was no room to stand, let alone sit down.

  I said, “What’s Eddie got to do with Moody?”

  “He had a lot of friends.”

  “He was a good man. A lot of people liked him.”

  “I don’t know about good. And nobody liked him. They owed him. There’s a difference.”

  I couldn’t agree, but I didn’t want to argue the point.

  “Proctorow owed him. After we arrested our man, Likker turned up in our incident room. Some bollocks about seeing how the latest efficiency measures were playing out on the ground. He took Proctorow aside, and by the time he left, ­Proctorow wasn’t so sure our man was the one. But the pressure was on from the Commissioner, so we charged him anyway.”

  “I still can’t see what this has to do with Moody and the woman at the bank.”

  “I’m getting there. When the guy gets convicted, the Commissioner himself comes down, pats me on the back, tells Proctorow he’s heard good things. But when the appeal goes through, the Commissioner’s nowhere to be seen. There’s an internal investigation and they announce they want someone who knows the force but isn’t a serving police officer to chair it. And guess who that might be? Likker. Proctorow’s moved sideways, off murders; I get canned. I knew I’d take most of the blame, but I still expected to be a detective.”

  “Bernie . . .”

  “I’d rather they’d just sacked me.”

  “Well now you’ve got your wish.”

  He looked startled for a moment, as if I’d slapped him. He said, “When I left here yesterday I went for a drink. You know, to celebrate? The woman not being dead and everything?”

  I nodded, but said nothing. Wherever Bernie was going with all this, I didn’t want to distract him from getting there.

  “Proctorow was in the pub. He comes over all full of himself and top of the world and won’t I let him buy me a drink? And when I ask why, he says he’s finally back with the stiffs. I ask how come, and he says Monday afternoon he turned up to a minor bank robbery – a piece of shit, he says; who bothers to rob banks these days? – only to find blood all over the walls and the bodies all piled up next door.”

  “Bodies?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Not ‘body’?”

  “He definitely said bodies. Two.”

  “Two’s not a pile.”

  “He was rubbing it in. They’re letting him keep the case and he couldn’t be happier.”

  I thought for a moment. “He didn’t say women?”

  Bernie scratched his beard. “He said bodies.”

  “Then . . .”

  “I didn’t get too inquisitive, Bill. He’d come to gloat. He’s made it back to the Promised Land. It wouldn’t have looked right.”

  “But you’re sure it’s our bank?”

  Bernie looked up, giving me that stare again. “How many banks in this city do you think get robbed in a day?”

  I actually had no idea. We didn’t keep the statistics that way – bank robberies were lost amongst all the other business crimes.

  Bernie said, “Bugger all, that’s how many.”

  The FBI are better at this. There’s about fifteen bank robberies a day in the US. It’s a bigger country, of course, with more banks and more guns. They break the stats down all ways, including by the total loot they took. They actually use the word loot; I find this obscurely reassuring, but the statistic itself is less than encouraging. In all the bank robberies in all the states of the union in the Year of Our Lord 2013, the average haul was less than $8,000. Hardly worth the bother. It made our twenty grand sterling look like the riches of Croesus. Then again, as Willie Sutton said, it never was about the money.

  Bernie said, “Two bodies.”

  “But we heard the woman screaming, and then Moody’s shot . . .” And then nothing.

  “I’ve been thinking about this,” Bernie said. “All night. Most of the night. When I wasn’t thinking about strangling Moody. She must have found one woman dead, the other screaming. And then shot her.”

  “For screaming?”

  I thought: just like she said.

  I thought: never trust a rhetorical question.

  If I’d been a detective, they’d have taught me that.

  Bernie pressed both hands down flat on the top of the desk, thumbs and forefingers forming a diamond. “So she lied.”

  It looked like he was right.

  “And now we’ll be done for murder.”

  “Only if they catch us, Bernie.”

  He pushed himself up, out of the chair. “Proctorow’s going to work this case to death. It’s his ticket back.”

  I tried to reassure him. I said Proctorow would get somebody, but there was no reason to suppose it would be us.

  “He thinks you’re a Loser, Bernie, not a bank robber.”

  “Thanks.”

  He stopped thinking about getting caught, and started thinking more about what we’d done. He sat down again.

  “Two women. We killed them, Bill. You said we never would, but we did. We shot them dead.”

  “You didn’t shoot anybody, Bernie.”

  He made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a cough. “That’s right. You did.”

  I closed my eyes. I saw the interview room at the bank, the fresh paint on the wall, the Deputy Manager’s face smiling and winking.

  Bernie said, “And Moody did.”

  I nodded.

  “And she left her balaclava there.” />
  He was right.

  “And then she lied to us. What are we going to do about her, Bill?”

  I had no idea.

  “What, Bill?”

  I told him I didn’t know. I said I’d think about it, but not now. I said I had a meeting, and I had to go. It wasn’t true, and Bernie knew it, but he said OK anyway, and he got up and left. He just wanted to be told what to do.

  I checked my diary, pointlessly. There was nothing in it before 2.00pm, when I was meeting Gerald Pryor to give him half a million pounds in return for the name of the man who watched it all and wouldn’t lie down. I wondered if I still wanted to know, how much difference it would make. It was only half-past ten.