Neon Madman

by John Harvey

  ‘How could I?’ She looked at me in astonishment. ‘I don’t know.’

  I let her slump backwards on to the pillows and took hold of her hand. It should have been hot but it wasn’t. It was as cold as alabaster.

  She began talking in a voice that seemed to be coming from somebody other than her own. It was as though she was no longer there herself. Just the white body on the wide, white bed.

  ‘The thin one, he didn’t believe me. He told me that if I didn’t tell him where James was he would kill me. Not quickly. He said it would take a long time. He said that by the time it was over I would be praying to die.

  ‘They made me take off my clothes and sit on a chair. They did … they did things to my body. I kept trying to get them to believe me but the thin one only laughed. Then he took out a knife. He said that he was going to cut little pieces off me until I talked. I think I must have fainted because the big one threw water in my face and then started questioning me.

  ‘It went on for a long time. It seemed a long time. All the while the thin man was getting more and more excited. He … he did horrible things with his eye. He took … took …’

  I poured some more brandy in the glass and handed it to her. She sipped at it and coughed.

  ‘When I still wouldn’t tell them what they wanted to know I thought that he was going to kill me. The one with the knife. I’m sure he would have only … only the other one pulled him away. They argued. I thought they might fight between themselves. Finally the man put the knife away and they went out of the room. I stayed where I was, waiting to … then the door opened and he came back into the room. The one with the funny eye. He took out the knife again and held it in front of my face. He said that he was going to come back and kill me. He was going to … to … to carve me up. That was what he said, carve me …’

  She stopped again and I knew that it was enough. For her and for me. They had got rid of Botterill and had been getting ready to get rid of Murdoch and now he’d disappeared from sight. I didn’t know for sure what their motives were but there wasn’t any doubting their methods. They would get to Murdoch if it meant tracking down anyone who had had contact with him and might be expected to know where he was. And the more frustrated they became in their search, the nastier they were going to get.

  In the heaviness of the room there was only the sound of Caroline sobbing. Then from below I heard the bell. I went to the top of the stairs and saw Dr Laurence along with a young woman wearing a white blouse and a pair of blue denim jeans. The doctor was holding a brown leather bag and the girl was carrying a dark blue suitcase. I waited for them to come up.

  The doctor went right in and started to examine Caroline, with the nurse helping him to undress her. I watched for a while, but I couldn’t take too much of it. Why should I? I didn’t have to.

  I pinched the brandy bottle and went downstairs and waited until they were through. It seemed to take a long while. There wasn’t much brandy left in the bottle by the time they both came into the room.

  ‘Where’s the coffee?’ he asked.

  I went off to find the kitchen and see. Ten minutes later we were sitting down and drinking coffee as if nothing had happened and there wasn’t a sick, frightened woman lying in the bed upstairs.

  ‘She’ll pull through all right,’ Laurence said, ‘and surprisingly quickly on the surface. What it might do to her underneath, what the long term effects might be I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess. I’ll get Sandy here to stay over night and probably Sunday as well. I’ll drop by in the morning to see how she’s getting on.’

  I gathered that the fair-haired girl who looked all of four days older than eighteen was Sandy. She also looked as though she knew what she was doing. I tried a quick smile out on her but she didn’t seem impressed. When it came to nurses, perhaps I should stick to fifty-year-olds. Or break a leg fast.

  Sandy finished her coffee and went upstairs to sit with her patient. Laurence looked levelly at me. ‘There’s no chance of them coming back? Whoever it was that did this?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. They’ll have moved on somewhere else by now. She couldn’t tell them anything they wanted to know.’

  Dr Laurence stood up. ‘Poor lass. It would have been better for her if she could have done.’

  I nodded and shook his hand. There wasn’t anything else I could do there. I went out and walked over towards my car. The rain had stopped but the sky was still overcast and it looked as if it might start again at any moment.

  I got into the car and sat behind the wheel, trying to sort out the ideas that were taking off inside my mind. Not that I thought it would do much good. There probably wasn’t a lot of point in trying to work out logical explanations.

  Life didn’t work according to any logic that I knew. If it did, philosophers wouldn’t still be arguing about things they’d been chewing over since the Greeks and all private investigators would be like Sherlock Holmes.

  Only Holmes wasn’t a real detective, whatever they get up to in Baker Street. He wasn’t real but I was and I didn’t need to pinch myself to make sure. So he could carry on using logic and scientific deduction and I’d muddle on the way I always did.

  If I kept walking down enough dark streets and through enough doorways, something was sure to happen. One time it would be the wrong street or the wrong door and that would be the end. But that hadn’t happened yet.

  I switched on the engine and slipped the motor into gear.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I only knew of one other person who might know of the whereabouts of James P. Murdoch. I knew of her and Tabor’s boys knew of her, too. They knew about her because when I was watching her, they were watching him. Which was the point where our lines became crossed and our interests began to get entangled.

  One more case of adultery and suddenly, before you could say the word orgasm, never mind experience one, there was Mitchell up to his arse in murder and near-murder, in all the niceties of crooked business and high finance.

  But, as the man said when he was preparing to push the sword down his throat for the third time that day, it’s a way of making a living.

  Not only living.

  I sat at the red light, starting to feel impatient and tapping with my fingers against the top of the dashboard. Not that I really thought minutes were going to matter. Not for me. And not for Marcia Pollard. They had either visited her or they hadn’t: she was either playing the part of a rather bored but statuesque widow or she wasn’t.

  I moved away to the news over the car radio that the weather prospects should allow play to be resumed in the Test on Monday. Well, good, a little reassurance was all I was looking for.

  No Rover in the drive and the open garage door showed that it wasn’t there either. The police would be hanging on to it until the inquest. I got out of my car and stood for a few moments in the drive, listening. I don’t know what I was listening for, but it seemed important that I do it anyway.

  It’s times like that which enable me to live with the illusion that I am, in fact, some kind of detective.

  Not that I detected much of apparent significance: the people on the right were either out or asleep; on the left someone—and it could be Marcia’s neighbour—was listening to pop music on the radio and occasionally singing along; behind me the sounds of hammering—improbably a father and son building what looked, when I turned, to be a sledge.

  And from the Pollard house?

  Silence. Not the heavy brooding silence that had greeted me earlier at the Murdoch place. This was lighter, almost inviting. Asking me to fill it with sound, with activity.

  The bell push was diamond shaped and dull orange in colour. I touched my thumb and forefinger to the woodwork and moved the next finger over the diamond. The bell wasn’t going to be necessary: the door swung open several inches under my touch.

  I felt as if someone was tappin
g me on the shoulder. Of course, they weren’t, but if they had been I know what they would have said. They would have told me to turn around and go away. To get the hell out of there before I put my big feet in another mess it was getting increasingly difficult to extricate myself from. Turn round and get into your car and drive away. Don’t make a fuss; don’t cause the couple with the wood and nails to notice you. There’s something about men with wood and nails that’s always disconcerting.

  I shrugged the imaginary hand off my shoulder. Marcia Pollard could leave the door open as force of habit. She could have slipped out for a loan of some sugar from the neighbour with the radio—even a little cuddle for consolation.

  Hell! I wasn’t going back to the car, and standing there like a novice encyclopaedia salesman wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

  I pushed open the door further, feeling the same fears that always shot through me whenever I did that same thing. The fears as to who or what would be waiting on the other side.

  A carpeted hall that somehow should have had a fluffy white cat sitting on it, but didn’t. Half-way down on the left a small table holding a green trimphone and a dark blue vase out of which stuck a bunch of cornflowers. They were past their best and turning white around the edges. The heads were drooping forwards, their weight causing several of the stems to break. A thin scattering of white lay over the table’s surface. The only other thing there was a white note pad for taking telephone messages.

  Immediately to the right of the front door were the stairs, which doubled back on themselves at the landing. These were carpeted in the same thick material, but the colour now was dark brown. There was a bright yellow vase on the landing floor. It was made from some acrylic substance. There were no flowers.

  Back down the hall and opposite the telephone table there was an open door. I moved forwards so that I could see inside: it was the kitchen. Black and white alternating tiles; fitted cupboards and shelves; a stainless steel double sink. Washing machine. Fridge. Freezer. Mixer. Blender. A pin board with recipes and a postcard from someone who had gone to Portugal.

  Alongside the sink there was a door which seemed to lead out into a back passage. On the other side of it something moved. A small movement, small but insistent. I slipped back two bolts, top and bottom, and turned the handle. A grey and white cat ran in, circled my feet twice, put his front paws up to the level of the sink, finally stood beside an empty saucer with traces of cat food still remaining.

  I could have taken a tin from one of the cupboards and fed it. I didn’t. I hoped it wouldn’t be too long before someone else fed it.

  At the end of the kitchen there were two wooden doors which made a hatch through into what I guessed would be the dining room. It was. A table in what might have been oak but probably wasn’t. Four dining chairs. A metal and wood shelving system with some expensive looking books and enough bottles of booze to make them apply for a liquor licence.

  Them. Her. Whoever.

  I knew from my previous visit that the other downstairs room was the living room; the one with French windows that led out into the garden.

  There was no one there this time. No love. A three-piece suite symmetrically arranged and looking so clean that it might have been delivered from the shop that morning. A fireplace that had never known a fire. A glass-topped table with the usual magazines on it. They hadn’t been read; magazines that are arranged that precisely and artistically are never actually read. It only showed that the local Women’s Institute gave classes on magazine arranging.

  Alongside the fireplace was several hundred pounds of stereo; all carefully assembled for the purpose of playing James Last versions of the classics and ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters.’

  I shut the door behind me and stood in the hall once more. Every minute I spent in the house I cared less and less about the people who lived in it—had lived in it. Whichever tense was appropriate.

  Everything so ordered and right: a veneer to hide the fact that he was fucked up by her and she was fucked by someone else.

  I know that my life isn’t anything to write home about when it comes to coping with relationships, but at least I don’t hide my failures behind an expensive, wall-to-wall carpeted and centrally heated façade of normal married life.

  How the hell did I know? Perhaps that’s what married life was. A detached furniture store within easy reach of the shops; an old man who takes an overdose in his last year’s Rover and a woman who opens her legs the way most people breathe.

  Perhaps that’s what’s meant by the nuclear family: get two people together, give them a ring to exchange and a vow that says till death us do part, then put a fucking great bomb beneath them.

  Well, death had parted the Pollards, sure enough. One down and …

  It had to be the stairs. After going through doors that were already just that little bit open, the thing I hated most was walking up flights of stairs in houses I didn’t know. I did know the kind of things private investigators were liable to find—I’d read the books, I’d seen all those movies. Thank Christ there wasn’t a cellar in this place!

  The carpet was soft under my feet and it carried on across the space at the top of the stairs. Three doors and one open. Every visit was getting to be like roulette and I didn’t feel I could carry on winning.

  The open door was the bathroom. I took two steps along the carpet and from there I could see into the mirror that ran down past the frosted glass window. I stopped walking and drew in a little more oxygen. I’d found the right room: won and lost on the first turn of the wheel.

  I could see the reflection of the side of the bath. Cold, white, smooth-looking; like the hands that had closed my eyes in my dream. Only no hands were closing my eyes now: least of all Marcia’s.

  Two things disturbed the clean line of the bath edge. A leg, bent across it at the knee. Higher up, lower in the mirror, an arm and head, the one lolling over the other. The hair was falling away from face and neck. I wished it hadn’t been. It might have covered the gash that began immediately below the ear and curved round sharply to a point underneath the jaw. The flesh hung open, like an obscene mouth widened through the shouting of obscene words. A mouth heavily smeared with lipstick. Except that it wasn’t lipstick.

  The blood had caked and congealed; it ran around the gash in thick corrugations—and around that a sated bluebottle made its noisy way.

  As I walked forwards it buzzed loudly as if to show its annoyance and flew up from the opening in the throat; down again to land upon one of her closed eyelids, its colour blending with the dark eye shadow. I raised a hand at it and it moved across the room and proceeded to knock itself silly against the closed window. I wondered where and when it had got into the room. Wondered how long she had been there like that I touched her skin. In the heavy, sticky heat of the room it was cold. Cold and stiffening fast.

  I went round and looked at the body from the end of the bath. One leg over the edge, the other jammed up against the tiles at the other side. Her pubic hair was short, as though she was in the habit of keeping it trimmed. Short and tightly curled. Dark. Three spots of blood had fallen on to it and hardened there like paint.

  The rest of her lay towards the side of the bath; the position in which her head had fallen dictating the angle at which it lay. Her breasts swung to the same side, the nipple of the left one squashing against the porcelain. The right breast was badly bruised and there was a tight grouping of reddish-purple marks around that nipple, as though she had been bitten. I tried to guess whether in love or in anger but I gave it up. I didn’t think it made any difference.

  High on her right arm there was a mark which could well have been a burn. The more I looked the more I saw: more bruising above her stomach; a cut along the sole of her right foot; an arrested swelling over the nose.

  A solid trail of blood traced its way down the side of the bath and over the tiled floor. But there
was very little blood. Not enough blood; not enough for what they had done to have happened in the bathroom. She had been carried there afterwards. Carried and dumped: dead weight.

  One more thing: around the ankle of the left leg, tightly around the ankle then dangling towards the floor, a piece of red flex.

  I wondered whether she too had known nothing to tell them, known nothing to appease Charlie’s anger.

  And this time the big West Indian had not been able to hold him back.

  The bluebottle was still hammering its fat body against the window. I turned around and pushed the top of the window open. The insect flew up towards the opening, but fell down the pane away from it. It tried again, tried again, fell again, fell again. I clenched my fist and brought the side of it down upon the bluebottle. Not hard; I didn’t want to crack the glass.

  I felt the thing squash and rubbed my hand a few inches either way. When I lifted the hand away it was speckled with black and tiny spots of blood. I wiped the mess off on a piece of toilet paper and dropped that into the toilet. I flushed the chain and waited until the water had swirled through and the noise had died away. Then I walked out of the bathroom. At the door I turned back and looked once more in the mirror. This time I hardly noticed the gash: all I could see was the length of red flex.

  I tried the bedrooms. In one of them the top cover had been thrown carelessly across. I went forwards and pulled it part way back. The bottom sheet was dyed red with Marcia Pollard’s blood.

  I threw back the cover and went downstairs. I went into the dining room and poured myself a brandy. Then I poured myself another brandy. I didn’t bother to make them small ones. The executors were unlikely to measure the amounts left in the various bottles.

  I was more careful with my fingers. There was no point in leaving a lot of prints around which would confuse the men from the Yard.

  I went back into the kitchen and opened some cupboards. I found a tin of cat food and used the tin opener on the wall. I’d once met a girl and known her for four days. She’d been young and pretty and her breasts had been firm and full underneath the see-through material of her blouse. We’d drunk coffee together and talked about things that had nothing to do with being a private detective. Four days and at no time had I even wanted to touch her. Four days and somewhere in that time she’d shown me how to use a wall-mounted can opener. I’d never used one before.