Dead Man Upright

by Derek Raymond

  ‘Me?’ said Firth. ‘Christ, I think it’s a wonderful idea. It looks like the wrong end of shit creek, and you haven’t even booked a plot at the cemetery.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said.

  He shouted, ‘Your bloody brain needs rewiring – Jidney could come back any time, while you’re in there, and then what?’

  ‘Then the coffin’ll have brass handles,’ I said. I got up. ‘Come on. Let’s go straight over to Thoroughgood Road and try it.’

  13

  ‘He’s still not back,’ said Firth, who had been up to see. ‘You’re all right for now.’

  ‘All right?’ I said. We were in Firth’s room. ‘Of course I’m all right. Even if he finds me in there don’t worry – I’ve got enough questions over Carat to make him seasick.’

  ‘When you’re fired remember I never knew you,’ said Firth. ‘You’ve got no warrant, you’re not ready to take him, you’ve got no evidence, you don’t even know what you’re looking for.’

  ‘I’m banking I’ll find something that’ll connect him to women somehow.’

  ‘I wouldn’t give you a hundred to one, and my uncle was a bookie. Get up there if you must, but don’t stop and water the flowers.’

  ‘I’ll be ten to fifteen minutes,’ I said, ‘and leave your door open, I might be back in a hurry.’

  I reached the top landing and was faced with the three doors Firth had seen. Meredith’s key fitted the centre one so I used it and let myself into the sitting-room.

  The first thing I noticed was that in spite of the cold both windows were open top and bottom. There was an easel in the far corner opposite, a desk against the wall on my left, a table and chairs in the middle of the room, and a hi-fi, video player and television unit at the back. I was looking at his cassettes on the shelf underneath this when something else caught my eye as abruptly as if it had shouted at me.

  An unframed painting stood propped on a table against the wall. It wasn’t a good painting. The brushwork was flat, amateurish and crude – in fact it was all the worse for the amount of time and labour that had been spent on it. Yet it was not just a bad picture, an untalented, banal picture, it was an evil picture. Panic, conveyed with a hypnotic power that had nothing to do with art, corroded the subject’s face; dread surged out of it with the same archaic power as prayer, forcing me out of the detached role of viewer into that of onlooker. The subject was a naked woman with the thin limbs and flaccid belly of middle age; she stood arrested in a hurried movement against shadows from which the corner of a table protruded out of scale, perhaps the table I was standing by. Enough of the expression in her eyes, which were dark with terror, had been captured to make even me shiver. She was gazing, not at the viewer but behind him, and her mouth was the more alarming because it had not been painted at all – an absence which suggested that if it had been there it would have been wide open, convulsed with a fear that the painter had seen no need to render, and screaming.

  Other parts of her besides the mouth, her genitalia, her nipples, were also missing. Her right arm, sharp against the blackness behind her, was horizontally extended; there was no blood anywhere, but in her right hand she held her disembodied left hand which dangled emptily, like a rubber glove. The whole concentration of the painting was in the intensity of her eyes; the rest of her crouched misshapenly off balance, as though to ward off an attack.

  At the foot of the painting was the word Purified, followed by a mocking face.

  I knew I was looking at a murder badly painted by the man who had committed it; I looked at it until I could bear it no longer, turning it face to the wall, and went back to searching the flat. The books yielded nothing; the furniture was the kind you would pick up at a car-boot sale. I looked into the bathroom – nothing. In the kitchen, just one item that interested me – Jidney had left a shopping-list on the table. Graphology interests me; criminal handwriting teems with evidence of caution, unbalanced thinking and deceit.

  This certainly fitted Jidney’s script, which I found remarkable as an example of both superficiality and aggression. The huge, embellished capitals were grossly out of proportion to the thready, manipulative middle zone which was decorated and enrolled, announcing an inflated but fragile ego supported by manipulative cruelty and coupled with a shallow desire to please. The ‘m’s and ‘n’s were arcaded in the classic formation of the fraud, and the upper zone was equally fascinating; the high loops of the ‘h’s and ‘1’s were abnormally tall and those of the ‘g’s and ‘y’s correspondingly long, entangling themselves in the strokes of the lines above and below, indications of mythomania and a vacillating hold on reality. The letter ‘i’ was capped not with a dot but with a long dash, a mark of violence, and the general tendency of the lines was an urgency towards the right-hand side of the page where, abruptly and on its own, stood the word ‘butter’ – here the last three letters reversed sharply into the rest, the bar across the double ‘t’ running backwards towards the ‘b’ in a single stroke, cancelling the first part of the word, a trait common in the script of assassins and suicides. Between the words ‘tea-bags’ and ‘eggs’ I found the drawing of another little face similar to the one at the foot of the painting and present for no reason – a symptom of associative dysfunctions and aural or visual hallucinations leading to sensations of depersonalisation and delusions such as divine commands, orders, and revelations.

  I went next door; the single bed in there was narrow and made up; the chest of drawers revealed nothing but clean shirts and socks. It was the same with the wardrobe, which contained two suits, a selection of ties and two pairs of black shoes. However much Jidney was worth, nothing in the place had cost much. I turned back into the living-room and went over to a table in one corner with a telephone on it. I took the number and went through the pad beside it; there was nothing on it but the word Ann traced through from the preceding page. In fact so far, apart from the painting, the flat was remarkable only for being exactly what it was – a place inhabited by a single man of few means. I stripped the armchairs and felt around in the lining. I might as well not have bothered; there was nothing there.

  That left the desk. It was a cheap roll-top, and the locks didn’t delay me long. There were five drawers, a long shallow one under the writing surface and two each side. There was a leather-bound photograph album in a black binding inside the long drawer full of photographs of women; some posed, taken in a studio, others just casual. The first was a dog-eared snapshot that showed a woman reclining uncomfortably on a grass bank and squinting into the sunlight. There was no date on it, but judging by her clothes and the way the snap had faded, it was at least twenty years old and signed Gerda on the back. All the photographs had names on them somewhere, several of them in Jidney’s handwriting.

  None of the sixteen women in the album were young. Besides Gerda I met Mandy, Daphne, Janice, Jenny, Judith, Frances, Mary, Christine, Sue, Pat. Flora was there too, of course, and I took the album across to compare it with the face in the painting; the latter was so distorted, though, that it was hard to be sure. I got the names down, memorised the faces and put the album back in the drawer – what else could I do? On its own the album was worthless, a circumstantial link at best; confronted with it, confronted with the fact, even if I could establish it, that these women had been dead for years, all Jidney had to say was ‘So what? Are you trying to say I killed them? Prove it.’ I looked at the time; I had been in there nine minutes already.

  I opened the top left-hand drawer. Folded, and lying under a packet of envelopes, paper-clips and paid gas bills, I found an old letter on HMP Gartree stationery dated 1972 that started: ‘Christine, After what I have done to you I don’t know how to begin this . . . ’ followed by a declaration of love. Here the writing, though it was Jidney’s all right, was barely legible compared to the sample in the kitchen; it was so pasty that the spaces inside many of the letters were filled in, written under extreme downw
ard pressure, the words formed so quickly that some of them had run into each other; also, in contrast to whatever sentimental message the writer was conveying, the upstrokes were pointed and vicious. But the decorated capital letters with their ornate scrolling were the same, reminding me of a bad actor trying to dominate a stage, and many of the words ended in sharp downward strokes like the plunge of a dagger. But the letter was no use to me either, so I left it and tried the drawer underneath.

  At first I thought that was empty too, then right at the back I saw a rectangular shape under the lining-paper; removing this I found a notebook two inches square. There was a six-digit figure, 713206, on the first page and nothing else – most of the other pages had been torn out. I copied it down in my notebook on the chance that, if I could only decipher it, the numeral and the photographs might somehow be linked, put the book back as I had found it and closed the drawer.

  I opened the last drawer and found just one video cassette inside. The box had a high street brand name on it. There was no camera in the flat but that could be anywhere – in a shed, a basement, in the boot of a car. I was just dropping the cassette into my pocket when I heard the street door opening and shutting again downstairs, so I locked the desk and left the flat the fast way, sliding down the banister to the second floor landing.

  I passed Jidney coming up from the first floor carrying a plastic bag. We didn’t even glance at each other, but I heard him stop on the stairs further up and knew he was looking back.

  When I got back to Firth’s room he said: ‘I saw him go in, you must have passed him.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘on the stairs between the first and second floors.’

  ‘Did you find anything?’

  ‘Enough to know we can’t go on like this on our own any more – I’ll have to straighten it out at the Factory.’

  ‘Are you any further on?’

  I told him about the painting, the photographs.

  ‘Photographs?’

  ‘Sixteen women.’

  ‘Check them with Missing Persons.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but it’ll take too long, there’s the Meredith woman to worry about.’

  I showed him the video.

  ‘That’s theft,’ said Firth. ‘If Jidney finds this gone or there’s nothing on it but Mickey Mouse you’ll have no knackers in your knickers.’

  ‘I’ll likely end up with neither anyway,’ I said. As I was leaving I showed him the number I had copied down from the notebook. ‘What do you think this means?’

  He looked at it. ‘Nothing to me.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t to me either.’

  14

  It seems a long time ago now since I first met Cruddie. He had been transferred to us from Dundee, and the first morning we ever met was the wrong one because it was my first morning back at work after a week’s leave.

  ‘I’ve got a lovely treat waiting for you,’ said Stevenson when I got in, ‘he’s called – it sounds like – Cruddie, he’s thirty-four, single, and keen as shit.’

  ‘You make him sound like Charlie Bowman at the chrysalis stage,’ I said. ‘What did they have to send him to A14 for when they’ve got Norway up there dead opposite?’

  ‘He’s no Charlie Bowman,’ said Stevenson. ‘He’s no pen-pusher, either.’

  ‘Can’t wait to get at a few of our idle southern villains, is that it?’

  He threw his empty Westminster packet into the out-tray. ‘I’m not sure I’d like to be the villain he did get at,’ he said, and added: ‘or one of us coppers that got out of line, either.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘well, what other problems have we got?’

  ‘I don’t know about us,’ said Stevenson, ‘but you’ve got two. Cruddie wants to see you, that’s one, to introduce himself I think is the idea. And so does Charlie – who’s bought another new hat to go up to a case in Millionaires’ Row by the way, so try not to piss in it, I can see you’re just in the mood.’

  Before I could say anything, steps clattered up our cement staircase to the second floor, pounding towards room 202. Stevenson slammed a pound coin on the table. ‘Talk of the devil, Charlie.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ I said, ‘you’ve lost that, that’s Eight O’Clock Andrewes on the dot with the bad news.’

  Sure enough, Sergeant Andrewes burst in. I collared the pound and Stevenson looked her over wearily. ‘You’ll never get married wearing boots like that, Deirdre,’ he said, ‘we couldn’t give you away in the prison chapel.’

  ‘You’re a dirty lot in here,’ said Andrewes, ‘and your pitiful minds are in the same state as your ashtrays, filthy, look at all those butts, the place stinks like a tart’s parlour.’ She pointed a plain unvarnished finger at me; it looked like a sausage that had been caught in a steel shutter. ‘Inspector Crowdie’s waiting for you.’

  ‘I’ll just take my steroids and get over there, then,’ I said.

  ‘A dose of Ian Crowdie’ll do you good,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, it’s Ian already, is it?’ said Stevenson lasciviously. ‘How nice.’

  ‘He was telling me in the canteen he’s a keen rugby player,’ said Andrewes. She turned red for some reason when she mentioned Cruddie, but that was book five chemistry that needed ideal conditions, not room 202 at eight in the morning. ‘He’s like a good whiff of the sea,’ she said, ‘you people make Soho smell like the South-East network, but he’s like a brisk salty day.’

  ‘Salt,’ I said, ‘I hate salt, it’s the one thing I’m allergic to. I served down at Shorncliffe once – I don’t like to think back.’

  ‘Think forward then,’ said Andrewes. ‘The inspector’s in 218, and waiting’s a trick I don’t think he’s mastered.’

  ‘He’s a detective,’ said Stevenson, ‘he should have.’

  ‘218,’ I said, getting up, ‘that’s the end of the corridor where hell is.’

  ‘And remember his rank when you get in there, won’t you, dear?’ Stevenson said to me, ‘he’ll likely be sensitive about that.’

  ‘Rank’s just symbolic,’ I said.

  Crowdie was sitting in 218 behind a battle-scarred metal table like my own, except that his was clean. When we had looked each other over he said: ‘Sit down. They tell me we’ll be working together, which from what I’ve heard sounds like hard work.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘you’ll find us funny folk at A14 – loners employed on clearing up unimportant deaths to close some little file, we don’t come on like Chief Inspector Bowman over at Serious Crimes at all. We aren’t allowed near anything that looks like page one, we’ve all been passed over for promotion, and we’ve all been punctured by buckshot, knives, or both.’

  Crowdie got out a pack of crumpled filters, lit one and pushed them over to me.

  ‘People keep telling you not to smoke,’ he said. ‘If they used the amount of television time they spend on smoking telling the public about the things we deal with in here they’d realise that we all might as well die of lung cancer, we’re too disgusting to live.’ He threw over some photographs of a dead girl.

  I found myself taking to him. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘now there are people who see this face as net waste, a dead loss, but I see it as the face of someone who didn’t want to go, or at any rate not like that. You get the people who say so what? She deserved it anyway, on the streets like that at fifteen, it’s disgusting. In this city, anyway; I don’t know about Dundee.’

  ‘Never mind Dundee,’ Cruddie said, ‘we’re a wearisome long way from it here, and talking of that I hear they call me Cruddie but my name’s Crowdie and I was born on the Clyde, so look out, I’ve a short fuse.’

  ‘Cruddie’s your nickname,’ I said, ‘you’re lumbered with it now – mind you, you’re doing well if you get a nickname here. Bowman hasn’t a nickname.’ I passed the morgue shots back and said: ‘It w
ould be nice to carry this discussion on another time – say over at The Trident. I don’t know what brings you to Poland Street, I pity you, but maybe it’s no ill wind.’

  He said: ‘Look down at Oxford Street in this fucking snow, and the folk hurrying about thinking they’re making sense of the world when they’re just using their wits while they can – and then one day they start getting bizarre feelings, one day when the rent’s owing, and then they think fuck it and top themselves, or else go out and top some other poor bastard.’

  ‘I don’t know if what you’re saying about people’s the official view,’ I said, ‘it’s certainly not the Factory’s view. But it is my view. Killers don’t care what they’re doing – these people are insane for my money, I don’t care what the judges say.’

  ‘Forget the metaphysics,’ Cruddie said, ‘we’re just here to catch them.’

  ‘Don’t I know it,’ I said, ‘but I wonder if you see my fury. A week back I had a mother whose fourteen-year-old daughter was raped on her way home from school – then the geezer cut her throat and I had to go and tell the mother that.’

  ‘Scalp-warriors,’ said Cruddie. ‘They do it so as not to feel small, like kids dressing up to make the grown-ups take notice of them.’

  ‘I do my best to look beyond our hateful ways,’ I said. ‘I only wish I had this country back the way it was. I don’t care what was the matter with it, we were a fucking sight better off then than we are now.’

  ‘Forget it,’ said Cruddie, ‘there was never any golden age.’ He stood up. ‘I hope we get on.’

  ‘Looks as if we might,’ I said, ‘welcome to a small club.’ We shook hands.

  But that was before; that was Cruddie in the old days. Today he was much less co-operative. When I got in he said: ‘Where the fuck have you been?’

  ‘Over at Chalk Farm.’