‘That isn’t it,’ he said, without thanking me, ‘it’s nothing to do with that – it’s about this man I’ve got for a neighbour on the top floor. I don’t think he’s normal.’
‘What’s not normal about him?’
‘He keeps out of sight when no one’s watching him.’
‘You’ve got to be extra normal to do that,’ I said. ‘Maybe he was in the Army. Anyway, if he’s that normal, I’m surprised you ever noticed he wasn’t.’
‘Well you know how it is,’ said Firth. ‘Once a detective always a detective – you get so used to noticing what’s hardly there that in the end you ask yourself if it’s there at all.’
‘Let’s hope that’s not the problem this time.’
He let that go. ‘He’s old, he’s about sixty, his name’s Henry Cross. He hardly gets any mail and there’s no name on the doorbell – I only learned his first name was Henry because one of his girlfriends called out to him on the stairs.’ He added: ‘And he’s got plenty of them. Including the new one, that’s number six in the eighteen months I’ve been there.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘so he’s not a recluse – well, they say the sex drive’s the last to give up. What are you suggesting? That these women went to see him and never came out?’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Firth, ‘do you think I’m saying his place up there’s stuffed with bodies? Forget it!’ He said with sudden fury: ‘Forget the whole thing! I thought I’d got hold of someone with a brain in his head but you’re a prick, so why don’t you just drink up and fuck off?’
I managed to calm him down. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Imagine you’ve got Cruddie or Charlie Bowman sitting opposite you and that you’re rambling on like this half-cut to one of them. I’m not taking the piss, I’m putting questions.’ I had a hard time keeping my own temper with him and shouted: ‘Christ, you know what questions are, don’t you? You’ve asked enough of them. Now get on with it!’
We sat there staring at each other and for a moment I thought he was going to have a go, but in the end he growled something and picked up the story again. ‘I noticed these women coming and going on the stairs, idly at first. But then, after the first three, I started noticing them more.’
‘Why?’
‘I started thinking, we all like to have a go, but it seems a busy sex life for a man of his age.’
‘How do you know they met for sex?’ I said. ‘It didn’t have to be for that.’
‘Look,’ said Firth. ‘I’ve been around, and the way he carried on with them it couldn’t have been for anything else. And another thing that struck me as funny: all his women have this in common – they’re plain, they’re middle-class, and they’re none of them young.’
‘Could be relatives.’
‘Now listen,’ said Firth. ‘I’ve got relatives, but I don’t go squeezing their knockers and kissing them all over, do I?’
I didn’t know what Firth did with his relatives, but I said: ‘All right, when he’s upstairs with one of these women, do you ever hear anything funny going on up there? Quarrelling, anything like that? No? Well, what’s the pattern in these visits, then? Do several of these women arrive together, or one or two at a time, or what?’
‘No,’ said Firth. ‘What happens with each one is that it’s always just one at a time for quite a while, and then one day he just doesn’t see that particular woman again any more. Not at the house, anyway. He doesn’t see her again, I don’t, nobody round the place does.’
‘Lovers’ quarrels.’
‘I don’t buy it,’ said Firth. ‘The way Cross does things is discreet, low-key – every time he brings a woman back with him they go out together twice, three times a week, cooing like turtle-doves, come back to his place over a period of time that’ll stretch to two, three months, and then one night, smack! He’ll go out with her and that’ll be it – late the same night or early next morning he’ll come back alone, and it’ll be the same with woman two, three, four and so on. After one’s gone there’ll be an interval where he’s on his tod and then, bang, along comes another one. I’m not saying there’s anything in it – yes I am, I’m saying there’s something that smells dead off about it to me. And anyway,’ he added, ‘I don’t like the cunt.’
‘Well, if we all started suspecting people on that basis everyone’d be in jail,’ I said, ‘but never mind, let’s have the address of this place of yours – where do you spread the mat?’
‘Thoroughgood Road, ten minutes from here. Some of the streets’s been tarted up as eighties yuppie, but not twenty-three – that could do with a lick of paint the way I could do with a beer barrel.’
‘You live upstairs? Downstairs?’
‘I’m ground floor left; ground floor right you’ve got the Turkish concert pianist (tell me another). First floor left is an old biddy, eighty-odd; then two other old bats opposite. Second floor is two single rooms – bookseller on the left-hand side of the landing, a man in computers on the right. He leaves at eight in the morning if he’s been home. Top floor is Cross’s place. That must be three rooms knocked into a flat because the centre door’s the only one with locks on it; the other two are part of the wall. New lock on the middle door. I know – I went up there one day and had a shufti.’
I thought that if he’d gone to the trouble of doing that then something must really be bothering him.
‘How do you pay the rent?’
‘Monthly.’
‘The landlord come round for it?’
‘I never see the landlord.’
‘Never? Never even passed the time of day with him, had the odd chat?’
‘No, I send the rent in by post – the only time I ever spoke to the landlord was on the phone once about the plumbing.’
‘What’s his name, anyway?’
‘Freddy Darko.’
‘That means something to me, that name does,’ I said, ‘though I can’t think just what offhand, which is irritating. Never mind, let’s have a description of Cross.’
‘He’s a cheeky little haemorrhoid,’ said Firth, ‘he gets right up my nose.’
‘So you said. Hold it.’ I was thinking about Cross. I went over and said to the barman: ‘Have you got a ball-point and a sheet of paper?’
‘What for?’ sneered the barman. ‘Thinking of taking up art?’
‘You’re spot on,’ I said. ‘We’re up in Hampstead for the day and my friend’s got this urge to do some portrait painting. He’s convalescing.’
The barman looked at me closely to see if I was taking the piss, but went off in the end and came back with some tired-looking paper. ‘I might as well open a bleeding corner shop,’ he muttered.
I rejoined Firth, put the paper on the table and handed him the pen. ‘I seem to remember you learned to draw,’ I said.
‘If you call that drawing.’
‘Draw me a face for Cross,’ I said. ‘We can talk while you’re doing it.’
‘It won’t be accurate, just meeting him like that on the stairs.’
‘Do your best, it’ll give me a face anyway.’
‘Mind, there was the night I ran into him in the local boozer,’ said Firth, pulling the paper towards him. ‘He gave me a long rabbit about the state the world was in and the soaring crime rate, reckoned all delinquents ought to be sent to penal colonies – he was like a tape-recording of Mein Kampf, you couldn’t get a word in, and then each time it came to a shout there he was with his glass shoved out, mean as a sparrow’s arsehole. And boring?’
‘Most criminals are bores,’ I said, ‘and the moralising ones I’ve met must run into three figures. They’re pretentious too – they think doing disgusting things somehow makes them interesting. So you had to buy all the rounds?’
‘Yes, if I wanted him to clack on. Except to my pocket I didn’t see the harm in it.’
‘Me neither. Did he t
alk about women at all?’
‘I tried to get him to, but he wouldn’t.’
‘Fancy,’ I said. ‘You’d think that with all the birds he’s got going he’d be keen to show off.’
‘I got the feeling he wanted to, but because he didn’t really know me he couldn’t.’
‘That’s funny,’ I said. ‘Not knowing someone doesn’t usually stop a bore, on the contrary – and women is the last subject they’re careful about. Why shouldn’t he have trusted you, I wonder? You never did anything as daft as tell him you’d been a copper, did you?’
‘Christ no, I wanted him on full chat.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Incidentally, speaking as a copper, does he ring a bell with you?’
‘No, but he looks bent enough to have form, and believe me I’ve thought about it.’
‘Think about it some more.’
‘I am doing,’ Firth said. ‘Give me that ball-point of yours, mine’s run out of ink. Thanks. No, I can’t place him, but you can’t memorise every villain in London, your head would go pop. But you could check with Records.’
‘Don’t worry about horror comics,’ I said. ‘I’ll get on to them if we need to.’ I was still thinking about Darko; the name stuck in my head like a dart in a board. Where had I heard or seen it recently? In a pub? A newspaper?
‘Another thing about Cross,’ Firth was saying. ‘He likes to give the impression he’s got no money, but that’s just moody – he’s not broke.’
‘You know if he works?’
‘I daresay at sixty he’s retired.’
I shut my eyes and smelled banks of faded chrysanthemums: ‘Some folks never retire,’ I said.
‘Are you all right?’ said Firth, nudging me. He shouted in my ear: ‘Hey!’
‘I’m OK,’ I said. ‘Talking of Cross and money, a flat like that in Chalk Farm, that has to run out at a hundred and thirty a week bottom weight.’ I looked over his shoulder: ‘How are you drawing his clothes?’
‘I’m putting him in his everyday gear,’ he said. ‘He likes to come on shabby, but I’ve seen the effort he makes when he goes out with a woman. By the way he’s got a car, nothing flash, a Cavalier, G-registered. Christ,’ he added, ‘I wish we had an identikit, I’m not getting his eyes right, I just can’t seem to get them that sunken-looking way. They look as if they were right at the back of the sockets, really weird. Maybe they don’t put women off, but they make me feel queasy – I watched him staring at his pint in the pub that night and I was surprised the glass never fucking shattered. Look, I can’t rub out, but I’ll do another sketch at the side.’
He finished it and said: ‘That’s a bit better, but they’re a real bastard to catch – like water in an indoor well. As for the rest, you can have a look in a minute, I’m finishing off now. Build? He’s thin, no all-in wrestler – still, I’d put him at six foot, and a hundred and twenty, hundred and thirty pounds easy.’ He pushed the drawing across. ‘Here, it’s a poxy effort, but it’s the best I can do.’
I picked it up. I saw what Firth meant by the eyes straight away. If he had got the drawing even half right it wasn’t a face you would remember unless it really looked at you, in which case you’d never forget it. I put the drawing in my pocket and said: ‘I’ll most certainly check it out.’
Firth got up and said: ‘Good, well that’s done. You buying? I’ll just go for a leak while you get them – and bring us a chaser with it, a ring-a-ding.’
When he came back he picked up his beer and drank it straight down, then the Bell’s, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. ‘Got myself a packet of Glodoms while I was down in the karzy,’ he said. ‘Just symbolic really, but you never know your luck. They light up in the dark, which is handy,’ he added, ‘because my dick these days, a woman’d be hard pressed to find it with a searchlight. What a price, though . . . Quid a throw, daylight fucking robbery.’ He turned his glass round in his hand. ‘I was thinking, that’s a reasonable likeness of Cross I’ve done you there after all – it’s not art, but it might help you over at horror comics. It’s always the same, you notice more about people than you think you do.’
‘That’s why you used to solve a few cases,’ I said. ‘Frank Ballard used to say you were neat.’
‘A busted detective’s free to use his brains,’ he said, ‘there’s no know-it-all snuffling down your neck, it’s your one advantage. Another thing, those women, I wrote down the dates I last saw them in case they ever show up on Missing Persons so you can check them – I’ve got the list at home.’ He felt around in his trousers pockets and came up with a dirty fiver. ‘Here, it’s my shout, but I’d rather you got them in – I had an argument with the governor the other day. I don’t know what it is they put in their ale these days, but it makes me aggressive.’
I still had Darko in my head. I said to Firth, ‘I’ve just got a call to make.’ There was somebody different behind the bar this time; I reckoned it was the governor.
‘Not many folk in here today,’ I said.
‘It’s flat all over. It’s the recession, nobody’s got the readies.’
‘I’ve seen pubs fuller than this one all the same,’ I said.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m Jewish, and if I’m not taking money in this area no fucker is.’
When I asked him where the ’phone was he jerked his thumb at a corner.
‘Can I use your directory?’
‘Did anybody tell you,’ he said, ‘this isn’t the bleeding post office?’
‘I appreciate that,’ I said, ‘only I can actually see the book sitting there.’
‘I’d be more obliging if it wasn’t for that pisspot over there you’re drinking with.’
‘Now don’t be judgmental,’ I said, taking the directory, ‘above all not in a dump like this – when you’re running a pub you have to serve all comers if you want to make a profit.’
The governor didn’t like that and I wondered if I’d pushed it too far; he had the sort of face that had been in battle often. I was over at the ’phone by the time he got his mouth open, though, so I missed his extremely comprehensive reply.
I looked through the Darkos and found an F. Darko & Associates which looked promising, so I rang it and struck lucky, because I got Mr Darko himself on the line. At that point my luck ran out, though, because the conversation we had was quite strange.
‘Mr Darko?’ I said. ‘Good, I’m trying to get hold of someone called Henry Cross. What’s that? You’ve never heard of him? That’s funny. I was told you were the landlord of a property, twenty-three Thoroughgood Road – it’s let out as bedsits. Oh, you are the landlord? Well then it’s even more peculiar you’ve never heard of Mr Cross, because he actually lives there on the top floor and has done for several years. What? The name means nothing to you at all? Oh dear oh dear, well, good old number twenty-three – real house of mystery. No, there’s no mistake, the name’s definitely Cross – unless you know the same man by another name. You don’t know him by any name, OK, OK, and what’s more you don’t give a . . . right, and yet you do collect the rent at twenty-three. Oh, I see, you don’t collect the rent. Who does, then? A company? What company? Carat Investments. One of your companies? Yes, I’m aware it’s none of my business, but there’s no need to be abusive – it’s just that I need to get hold of Mr Cross urgently. Now hold on, don’t hang up on me. Who am I? Well, since you don’t know Mr Cross there’s not much point my telling you, is there? I just happen to have some information that might interest him a good deal, that’s all. Would you be prepared to pass my message on to Mr Cross? You wouldn’t. What you mean is that you can’t, because you don’t know who he is. Yes, I agree, that’s reasonable enough, sorry to have troubled you, Mr. Darko, goodbye.’
I needn’t have bothered with that, though, because the line had gone dead anyway. I ordered a new round, went back to Firth and repeated the conversation.
> ‘All right,’ said Firth, ‘well then Cross can’t be his real name. Or else it is, only it isn’t the name Darko knows him by. Or else Darko’s lying.’
‘Yes, I like that theory,’ I said, ‘I think that’s far more likely – Darko came on as one of those folk, a ready lie springs to his lips. Still, don’t let’s get excited. After all, if everyone in this country only used one name it would practically halve the population.’ I thought for a while. In the end I said: ‘Well, I don’t know. As far as I can see, this is what we’ve got – a man living alone entertains six different women one after the other. They visit him singly over an eighteen-month period; then one evening he goes out with the current runner and comes home alone late that night or early next day, and that’s the last anyone – anyone at Thoroughgood Road, anyway – ever sees of that particular woman. After that he’s on his own for a while, then one day he comes home with some other woman, brand new. Aside from that his landlord doesn’t know him by the name you know him by, or says he doesn’t – and that’s it, and there’s no crime in any of it.’
Neither of us said anything for a bit.
‘Look, I agree it sounds pretty depressing put like that,’ said Firth in the end, ‘but why don’t we just go over to the place? That way you might even get a look at Cross for yourself, or maybe just going there will tell you something.’
‘This really has got to you, hasn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Firth. ‘I know I keep saying it, and I know I can’t prove it, but Cross stinks.’ He murmured under his breath:
Where’er you scent a fart, they say,
A turd’s not far behind.
‘You ought to give readings from Marlowe like that more often,’ I said. ‘You do it beautifully.’
4
It was dark when we reached Firth’s place. The vanishing year groped its way across North London, smearing the pavements with patches of freezing damp that reminded me of our daily crime scenes, of people who had trailed their broken heads into the corner of a wall and died there.
Dead Man Upright Page 4