Dead Man Upright

by Derek Raymond

  He did not.

  ‘What you have to try to do,’ he continued, ‘is to put yourselves in the place of someone to whom fulfilment can only come negatively, through killing – a fulfilment he can never achieve. This failure to achieve is of course precisely what drives him to continue to kill, in the hope that next time will be the time. Simultaneously he is also leading the life of a model citizen. But this entire lifestyle is a lie because his destructive actions contradict it – the truth about himself that he has to hide is his profound and total hatred of the human race. He also finds the normal human being incomprehensible; this in turn is a reflection on his intelligence and thus on his self-esteem, which is so fragile that it must be protected at all costs. His answer to this is to convince himself that he is superior to the rest of us – if you like, it is the dunce insisting that he is the brightest boy in the class. Reverting to the question of being caught, such a person is of course terrified of what will happen to him if he is caught, because he will expect to be judged on an eye-for-an-eye basis – as in many countries indeed he would be. But in fact the serial killer is a sad individual, whose every action, killing apart, is a lie.’ He began scooping his papers together, adding: ‘What protects the killer is his realisation that the bulk of society is humdrum, conformist, and therefore rarely bothered by the police. He has only to hide in that bulk through copying it to avoid detection – remember also that, like a politician or a comedian on television, what the killer is really trying to do is find out how much he can get away with.’

  Somebody laughed, and there were some desultory questions. When they had died out the lecturer thanked us and left; the conference broke up and we left too, drifting out into the smell of lunch from the canteen. I remembered suddenly that next week it would be my daughter Dahlia’s birthday, and that I must buy flowers to put on her grave. How time passed; she would have been twenty-one. But to me she is always nine, the age she was when my wife Edie threw her under a bus.

  As for Edie, I wished she would die; she would be better off than in the place where she’s shut up. I never go down to see her any more; they say she’s got much worse lately and wouldn’t recognise me.

  Sometimes I wake in broad daylight and shut my eyes because night seems always to be coming down over the world.

  I recalled something my father once told me as a boy: ‘Do whatever you like in this world except damage.’

  7

  I drove down the Baize in the morning to see Darko. The weather had changed. The forecast on the radio was more snow, but right now the sky was cloudless and it was freezing hard. The trees in Hyde Park were rimed with frost, and the whole city gleamed white, gold and silver, as clean as if overnight it had suddenly been purged of crime.

  It hadn’t. I managed – for a while anyway – to forget about the crack dealer who had died in the night in cell four. Bowman, with his mates Sergeants Rupt and Drucker, had been getting information out of the man the way Paris detectives call picking the worms out of his nose – in fact his stomach had been mortally jumped on. I thought we had lost Drucker for good when he went to Pretoria on exchange as part of his training for inspector – no such luck, he failed the exam. The positive aspect was that the file had gone right the way up to Jollo, who had turned white because of the current love-your-villain climate and wanted to know if the prisoner had had a solicitor present. Well of course, in the state he was in, dead, the poor bastard hadn’t, so that the three of them would be on the fucking mat. The story would stay indoors if Jollo could keep it there; but because Bowman was nobody’s favourite and behaved as if PACE was still thirty years in the future, it could easily leak.

  I was going to see Darko because I couldn’t see where else to start on Thoroughgood Road. I had read up his past as a petty villain – smuggling immigrants into the country on forged documents and small to medium property fraud. Fred’s CV didn’t interest me. If he belonged to anyone it was to Alfie Verlander, and I had found Alfie playing snooker in the inspectors’ canteen and had a word with him. As it happened, Alfie was investigating Darko right that moment, though he didn’t know that yet, and he gave me the story behind the one Tom Cryer on the Recorder was running on him, which supplied the detail I had been trying to remember with Firth. Alfie said I was welcome to give Freddy a hard time if it suited me – meanwhile he hadn’t known about his connection with Carat Investments, so he thanked me and made a note of that.

  Being away from Thoroughgood Road now and also a pessimist, I seriously wondered for a moment if I was wasting my time with it; on a morning like this, driving along Bayswater Road in light traffic with the radio on, it was tempting to write Firth off as a busted copper with a permanent thirst on and Cross as just another old geezer who reckoned he could still get it up. Or it might have had something to do with Christmas approaching – not that that ever changed anything at the Factory except for the worse.

  But my euphoria died abruptly with the reception I got when I arrived.

  Pyramid Mansions was a block of very expensive flats behind Whiteley’s, and I was well started across the wastes of foyer towards the lifts wishing I had a camel and a week’s iron rations, when someone with a face like a rifle target and a jacket like a gilt-edged share popped up behind the reception desk. ‘Hey, you!’ he shouted. ‘Yes, it’s you I’m talking to! Where do you think you’re going?’

  His manner pierced the flimsy veil of my well-being like a Serb rocket.

  ‘Hullo,’ I said, ‘I want to see Freddy Darko, is he in?’

  ‘Mr Darko’s not seeing anyone today, and he don’t like scruffy people.’

  Perhaps this individual had once been a sergeant-major. I walked over to him and said: ‘Is that your neighbourly way of telling me he’s out, friend?’

  He put a finger inside his field-marshal’s collar and adjusted his gawky chin over it. ‘That’s not what I said.’

  ‘So it won’t be a wasted visit then, will it?’ I said. ‘I’m glad of that, John.’

  ‘My name’s not John.’

  ‘You look like your name was John.’

  ‘Maybe I do, but it isn’t.’

  ‘It is today, John,’ I said, ‘because I say it is, and I’m on the taxpayer’s petrol.’ Whereupon I proffered my warrant card, which upset him.

  ‘I think Mr Darko is indisposed today,’ he said, ‘however I will ring through and see.’

  ‘Miss Otis regrets, does she?’ I said. I put my hand over his hand which was on the phone. ‘It’s all right, John,’ I said, ‘no need to be too user-friendly, just slow right down and don’t be fucking clever. I’m going upstairs now but don’t announce me, OK, otherwise you’ll be singing Hark The Herald in a treble that’ll surprise your whole family.’

  I had to work the bell hard when I got up to Darko’s flat, but the door finally opened a crack and I stuck my boot in it. ‘Any high-fliers at home?’ I said.

  A face popped round the edge of the door.

  ‘Darko?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  I pushed past him into the sitting-room. ‘There you are Freddy,’ I said, ‘Christ, you’re playing hard to find, what are you up to? Rehearsing The Invisible Man?’ I shut the door behind me and leaned on it. ‘You don’t mind, do you? Anyway I’m in. We haven’t had the pleasure yet but you don’t give a monkey’s because that’s all going to change.

  Darko coughed; I soon had him doing plenty of that. His clothes were on the casual side and he probably wasn’t in his forties yet, but he hadn’t worn well at all. He had an Irish tweed cap on that he didn’t even take off indoors; it had a slit cut in the back seam with a pony-tail of flaxen hair poking through it. He must have played rough as a kid, or perhaps it was the booze; anyway he had a nose like a Tuscany mushroom and a mouth like a burst squash-ball.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he said. ‘More press? I’ve had enough of you bastards. You’d better use the door f
ast, mate, otherwise it’ll be work for the window.’

  ‘I’m not from the press,’ I said, ‘though I’m aware you’re in schtuck with it – no, I’m from the other, friendly mob but I forgot the flowers, sorry about that.’

  ‘What other mob?’ he said. ‘How did you get up here, anyway? Through a rat-hole?’

  ‘Nothing to it with one of these,’ I said, and showed him my warrant card; I was keeping it busy this morning.

  He looked at it, turned pale and said: ‘A14? Christ, are you on a death, then?’

  ‘I might be.’

  ‘I don’t know about anything like that.’

  ‘You don’t know what you don’t know till you tell me what you do know,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? He gazed at me in feigned astonishment, like one madman spotting another.

  ‘It means a chat,’ I said.

  ‘What, chat to you?’ he said. ‘What do you think I’ve got for a head? A popped light-bulb?’

  I thought it looked like one. ‘It’s no good, Freddy,’ I said, ‘you’re going to have to squeeze the brains.’ I sat down in a gilt chair covered with Chinese ladies darting in and out of pagodas and looked around. ‘Nice place,’ I said. ‘Pity we can’t all afford one – but it seems the only people who can in these hard times are folk who don’t pay the rent – eighty-nine thousand quid you’re in arrears, aren’t you? Oh well, that’s democracy.’ I sighed. ‘Everyone according to his needs, and with a place like this one, Freddy, yours must be pretty special.’

  ‘That’s between me and the council,’ he shrieked. ‘Is that what you’ve come about?’

  ‘Of course it isn’t,’ I said, ‘don’t be so thick. All the same, it’s a juicy one, isn’t it?’ I took out the press clipping Alfie had given me. ‘Eighty-nine grand going back to 1990, yet the council’s still paying the duke, which it says here is seventeen hundred a week – meantime you’re drawing income support on top and you’re not even a British subject. I bet they’d like to know how the scam works back in Sydney – my, my, Fred, how do you do it, what’s the secret?’

  ‘You do social work in your spare time or something?’ he sneered.

  ‘In a way,’ I said. ‘You know, this is one day where it’s fun being the law, Freddy, because I’ve just had a chat with a mate of mine, Detective-Inspector Verlander over at Serious Fraud, and when I leave here I think I’ll go and have another, and then the three of us, you, me and him, can sit down, piece all this hokey together and work out how a few other homeless folk can get in on this fucking thing.’

  Darko swallowed.

  ‘But of course you wouldn’t want a lot of bother like that,’ I said, ‘so you might avoid it by giving me a whole load of help on something else.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Now a minute ago I told you we didn’t know each other, but that’s not strictly true – as a matter of fact we had a lovely rabbit on the phone together only yesterday.’

  ‘I don’t think we did. No, I don’t remember anything about that.’

  ‘Now don’t start losing your memory yet,’ I said, ‘it’s early days and I’m telling you we were, Fred. It was me that rang you yesterday afternoon wanting to know if you were the landlord of twenty-three Thoroughgood Road up in NW1, and you said you were. Which was fine.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Darko, ‘come to think of it I remember that now. Only of course I didn’t know it was you.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said, ‘I realise you’d have been more polite if you had. But now we’re getting onto things that aren’t fine at all and I don’t want you playing silly buggers, Fred, so listen carefully and let’s get the answers right first time. During that conversation I asked you if you collected the rent from twenty-three Thoroughgood Road and you said you didn’t collect it in person.’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘The tenants pay the rent to Carat Investments, and that’s your company, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And in particular I asked you then, and I’m asking you again now, if among the tenants at that property you were aware that one of them was a man named Henry Cross. Yesterday you said you’d never heard of him. Now is that what you’re still telling me today?’

  ‘I told you yesterday, and I’m telling you again now, I’ve never heard of anyone called Henry Cross.’

  ‘Now look,’ I said, ‘I’ll try to be reasonable, for a minute anyway, though frankly it’s not my style. There’s a double order of porkies in all this somewhere, because this man Cross actually exists in flesh and blood – he’s existed at twenty-three Thoroughgood Road for years. All right, then, let’s put it another way – if he’s not called Cross, what’s the name of the thin bloke, oldish, about sixty, who lives on the whole top floor at Thoroughgood Road?’

  ‘I tell you, I don’t know.’

  I exploded. ‘Christ! Are you telling me you don’t know the names of your own tenants? Do you mean you’ve got so many tenants scattered around London you can’t even remember their names? You will have to do much, much better than that, you little criminal, otherwise I’ll have you out in the road with your gear on top of you before you can sneeze backwards in Greek, I’ll find a fucking way. Incidentally, how many more properties do you collect rent from besides Thoroughgood Road?’

  I saw by what happened in his eyes when I put the question that there was no shortage. ‘Bloody mini Robert Maxwell we’ve got here,’ I said. ‘Here you are, a hero living on the fat of the land at the taxpayer’s expense, and at the same time you’re gouging out money all over London – why, it’s a scandal!’ I said in a threatening manner: ‘You do realise, don’t you, that just one word from me to Inspector Verlander and you’re over the top with this one, Fred. In fact I don’t see how we can continue this conversation here, in view of what you’ve told me. So I think I should like you to come down to Poland Street with me right away so that I can question you further in the presence of your solicitor and other officers.’ I reached for the ’phone: ‘I shall now call for a squad car.’

  ‘Drop that phone!’ he screamed, ‘you can’t do that to me, what’s the fucking charge?’

  ‘No charge – just helping us with inquiries. You’ll be out in twenty-four hours if you’re clean. But then if you aren’t, of course, you won’t be, and that wouldn’t surprise me at all because nobody, Fred, nobody is ever really squeaky, squeaky clean. Especially not with your record.’

  ‘Now wait,’ he said, ‘let’s keep calm about this and sort it all out, OK?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m not at all noted for calm but I’ll tell you what I will do, I’ll give you one more go at this Thoroughgood Road thing. One.’

  ‘Cross,’ he said, ‘that name rings no bell with me at all, I swear it doesn’t.’

  I began to believe him. ‘How about Drury for a name, then?’ I said, ‘does that one work any better?’

  ‘Big fat zero. Nishty.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, standing up, ‘well as you’re all dressed and ready Fred, let’s go. You steer, I’ll take the pony-tail.’

  ‘No. Wait.’

  ‘Thoroughgood Road, then. Come on.’

  ‘Well, whoever it is,’ said Darko, ‘if he’s paid his rent in through a bank or a post office he’ll have a paying-in book and you could have a butchers’ at that.’

  ‘You berk,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to find him first to look at his paying-in slips, haven’t I?’

  ‘I can’t see why you want to bother! What do you want to find the geezer for, anyway? What does it matter what his bleeding name is?’

  ‘You’re not interested in any of that at all,’ I said, ‘I’m leaning on you over Henry Cross, so you just concentrate on that. And don’t try to be creative, it’s not your day.’ He didn’t say anything, though I could see he was making up his mind
to have a try, so I added: ‘You’ve got while I count sixty, starting now.’

  ‘Well,’ said Darko after a lot of coughing, ‘it’s difficult because some of the tenants – all right, then, Carat doesn’t always keep records.’

  I looked as shocked as I knew how. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Are you telling me you’re just taking money from these people and stuffing it in your pocket to go and get pissed on? I don’t work for the Fraud Squad, Freddy, but I shouldn’t think Inspector Verlander’s going to like that when he hears about it, the Inland Revenue neither.’

  ‘Hey, there’s a bit more to it than that!’

  ‘Yes, but take the bits away and what’s left?’ I said. ‘As far as I can see, what’s left is that cross your palm with silver, Freddy, and good old Gipsy Lavengro here lets rooms and flats on moody agreements to people with any old name.’

  He nodded miserably.

  ‘Or even no fucking name.’

  He nodded again.

  ‘This is getting better and better, Freddy,’ I said. ‘So you cop for the lolly, cash, no record, and then just go out and blow it? But didn’t you know that’s against the law? Know? Do I know what day Christmas is? You are a terrible little deviator, Freddy, and you are in a diabolical lot of bother – it must be your birthday or something.’

  ‘More likely my bleeding funeral,’ he muttered.

  ‘Quite possibly,’ I said, ‘yes, that’s highly likely – the way you’re going on at the moment you might as well fold up and die. Unless you try a lot harder.’

  I sat back and looked at him. Even though he looked like something that had died in a deckchair he was still lying; he wasn’t depressed enough yet to be telling the whole truth. Nobody knew better than I did how depressed people looked when the whole lot was finally screwed out of them; it does terrible things to a man.