Dead Man Upright

by Derek Raymond

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘He’s got no choice,’ I said. ‘Put yourself in his place. He doesn’t know what to do. Of course he wants to abandon Thoroughgood Road, but he can’t. He’s got to stick to it like shit to a blanket, because my bet is that he’s left gear in there and he’s got to move it.’

  ‘What sort of gear?’

  ‘Gear that probably smells,’ I said, ‘after that video and the painting I wouldn’t put anything past him. Could even be bits of people – the first thing I noticed when I searched the place was that the windows were open top and bottom, though it was a freezing cold day. I didn’t notice any smell, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things well past their sell-by date hidden there somewhere; I hadn’t time to take the pad apart the way I’m going to the next time I go round. That’s part one of his nightmare; part two is that not only does the cassette show him in the process of committing a murder; it also reveals the vault, and if anybody finds that vault he’s cooked. Then there’s the rest of the scenario. Ronald’s got to move these items in case whoever whizzed the video goes in for a second bite and finds them – yet at the same time he’s scared he’s being watched and likely to be stopped on his way out with the gear on him. The one thing that’s sure by now is that he knows his cassette’s gone, and as long as he’s not tracked that down he’ll be flying round and round the neighbourhood like a bat at a bonfire wondering who the thief was and, worse still, how the hell he was rumbled.’

  ‘Do you reckon he thinks it was the law that took the cassette?’

  ‘How can he know we’re onto him,’ I said, ‘and yet how can he know we’re not? He thought he was a hundred per cent hidden and that’s the point – he must be tearing his hair out wondering how the hell anyone got onto him – even if he thought it was you he wouldn’t connect you with us in a thousand years. And then, on the other hand, if it isn’t the law, he must be beating his brains out wondering who the hell it could have been, how, and why. Carat’s the only possibility, he’ll think, but there’ll be no blip from there – one wrong move from Darko and he’s an accessory to murder, ten to fifteen years with his form; I told him and he freaked.’

  ‘Then there’s Meredith,’ said Firth. ‘It must have shaken the shit out of him when he heard her talking to us in my room, because you can bet that was him at the window – and now he’ll be wondering where the hell she’s gone and why she isn’t answering her ’phone at Maida Vale.’

  ‘Well, you saw him leave here with that airline bag,’ I said, ‘and thank God Stevenson’s with her, but I shan’t be happy till she’s in a police station or in a safe house – not after what I saw happen to Flora.’ I swallowed because I felt sick at the memory. ‘Finding death isn’t the same as watching it happen.’

  ‘It was really that bad?’

  ‘If you’d seen it you wouldn’t need to ask.’

  ‘Even so, I don’t see how you can nail Jidney yet – you still haven’t got a body.’

  ‘Not that you could do an autopsy on, no,’ I said, ‘but that cassette will get any jury running for the jacks, and as likely as not the judge too.’

  ‘This cassette. Is Jidney in it?’

  ‘In it?’ I said. ‘He made it. He set the camera running and he’s the star – I’ll need you to identify him when the time comes. The victim too.’

  ‘I’ve seen death often enough,’ said Firth, ‘but I don’t think I ever want to see that film.’

  ‘You’ll be called as a witness when this goes to trial,’ I said, ‘so I’m afraid you may have to. Meanwhile I’d rather not talk about it.’

  ‘Do you think he’s got many more videos like that?’

  ‘Who knows?’ I said, ‘but this one will do.’

  ‘You’ve still got a lot of miles to do.’

  ‘I know I have,’ I said. ‘Miles into hell, and I’m afraid.’

  17

  I rang Frank Ballard because I had to; I felt the over-powering need to lean on a friend’s reason. ‘I feel physically sick, Frank,’ I said when he answered, ‘I need help, advice, a friend, and have you got a video player? I’ve got something I need you to see on it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Afraid?’

  ‘Right now I’m afraid of my shadow.’

  When I got round I told him I was in trouble with a case and added: ‘I’ve been making enemies at work again. Bowman.’

  ‘People like you hit a brick wall just as hard as other people,’ said Ballard. ‘I can’t seem to get it into your head that you might as well go round punching donkeys in Galway as have a go at men like Bowman.’

  Frank had moved into a ground-floor flat over at Kensal Rise; it had a long sitting-room and french windows leading into a tangled garden. I ought to explain about Frank. He was a first-rate detective who transferred to A14 for the same reasons I did, cutting himself off from the career he deserved with the high-fliers over at Serious Crimes.

  But a career of any kind finished for him, anyway, the summer night in 1980 when he was off duty and driving home down Fulham Palace Road; there he saw a cook on his own in a take-away being menaced by a villain in a balaclava with a sawn-off. Frank stopped and sprinted in there, telling the thief to put the gun down, but as he turned to tell the cook to get down on the floor the thief fired, hitting Frank in the spine; then he ran off and we never got him, though it’s a file that’ll never be closed. Frank was paralysed from the waist down; they told him his spinal cord would grow at a rate of one millimetre a year and he wanted to die at first, even though he had been decorated and the Queen Mother came to see him in hospital; but instead of despairing he took an honours degree in philosophy and psychology through Open University and he’s a PhD now, costs you a dollar to speak to him, and I go to him whenever I’m in difficulty just as I always used to, which is what friends are for. He follows what we’re all doing in the papers or on television or else we go and see him; his brain’s better than it ever was, and as he says himself, he’s got nothing to do but sit and think anyway, so he might as well make the most of it.

  ‘I’m resigned now,’ he told me once, ‘and that’s good. Better than being dragged off kicking and screaming.’

  I wonder if he really meant that deep down; but anyway, now he gets around really fast in what he calls his electric chair, and it’s not often I come up with a problem and he hasn’t some new slant to offer.

  ‘How about a beer?’ he said when I got there, but he had already gone to get us one. ‘All right,’ he said when we were ready, ‘who’s the body?’

  ‘There isn’t one yet,’ I said, ‘that’s the trouble – all I’ve got is one waiting to happen.’

  ‘Then how do you know you’ve got a killer on your hands at all?’

  ‘Because he makes high-grade murder movies.’ I told him all I knew about the Jidney business so far, then produced the cassette. ‘This man’s writer, cameraman, producer, director and central character in a cast of two,’ I said. I switched on the video recorder. ‘I wouldn’t normally bother to say this to you, Frank,’ I said, ‘but this is a film you want to take very easy – we don’t have to watch it all at once, we can do it in stages.’

  ‘I hope I haven’t gone that soft,’ he said.

  I shook my head. ‘This is different. You’ve got the soundtrack and all. Stevenson and I have just seen it.’

  So then we watched it through; we managed to do it in one. Being the second time for me, and what with the soundtrack, I think it was worse for me than for Frank. When it was over Ballard said: ‘How did you get onto this?’

  ‘Firth used his brains,’ I said, ‘and to think I didn’t take him seriously to start with.’

  ‘I take it back about the movie,’ said Ballard, ‘my nerves must be going back on me, there were a couple of times there when I thought I was going to spew.’

  ‘You aren’t the only one,’ I said. ‘You
ought to see the painting the man does too – he’s a real fucking artist, some collector freak would pay him a fortune. He’s got to be put in the shade, Frank – in fact if I had my way he’d leave the building for good. But it’s teasing. Here I’ve got the body, and I’ve got the killer, there they both are on film, but they’re only on film. I even know where he lives, thanks to Firth, only Ronnie won’t do me the favour of being in when I call so I can’t have a word with him, what a shame. So one of the things I’ve got to find out, before his next women gets done, is where this was shot and the name of the woman in it. But the trying thing is that I’ve only got seventy-two hours, otherwise I’m in schtuck with the Voice, and that’s another problem.’

  ‘Why don’t you just get the Voice to see that video,’ said Ballard. ‘You’d get more time.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, ‘the Voice is in Paris on an EC police conference. George Jollo’s in charge.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ said Ballard, ‘getting him to see anything is like teaching the alphabet to a brick wall.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but luckily I’ve got Stevenson on loan in spite of Bowman trying to get him off me, so I’d rather the two of us tried to crack it in the time.’

  ‘You got any name for this runner of yours besides Ronnie?’

  ‘I’ve got several,’ I said, ‘but I don’t know whether I’ve got them all. The name he goes under in the house he lives in, which is where Firth lives, is Henry Cross. On the other hand he owns four houses run through a property company, Carat Investments, managed by a little deviator called Freddy Darko, where he appears as a man called Rich. But Barry’s dug me up a file for the same face under the name of Jidney, Ronald James, whereas his current girlfriend is convinced he’s a Mr Drury. You ever heard of anyone called Jidney, Frank? Does he ring a bell with you?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Well there you are,’ I said, ‘that’s you, me and Firth, we none of us make him, and yet look at his sheet here, look at the form he’s got.’

  Frank looked at it, but he could only say the same as Firth had – no one could keep up from memory with every villain we had on the books. ‘And you’ve no idea who the victim in the film is?’

  ‘Barry’s been checking her on Missing Persons,’ I said, ‘and there’s a chance it could be Flora Borthwick, fifty-four, unmarried. The dates fit, only the face Barry’s got of her is just from a holiday snap, and the resolution’s so bad and shows her as so much younger that he can’t be sure.’

  ‘Well, we can make a guess where he got the houses from,’ said Ballard, ‘You’ll have to check the past owners back through the land registry.’

  ‘That’s what Firth said, and of course we will, but it’ll take too long; I want Jidney now, before he kills anyone else. This new woman Meredith he’s got on the hook, for instance.’

  ‘Anyone else missing apart from Flora?’

  ‘It could be half the women’s army corps for all I know,’ I said, ‘but if each of the photographs in the album I found is a death, then it could be sixteen to be going on with.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  Together we went over everything I had copied down in Jidney’s flat. When I came to the six-digit figure I said: ‘I picked this up – it might have everything to do with the case or nothing at all, I don’t know because I can’t make head or tail of it. Which is sod’s law, Frank, because if it is a lead it’s about the only one I’ve got.’

  He looked at it for a while and then said: ‘Can’t you make anything of it?’

  ‘Do you mean you can?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘but it mentions here on his file that your Ronnie did his national service.’

  ‘So what of it?’

  ‘It’s just an idea.’ He moved over to a row of bookshelves at the end of the room, picking up a long pole with a hook on the way. He looked up at a line of tall volumes on the top shelf and muttered: ‘This is the tricky part – try catching this as it comes down, but mind your head.’ He got the hook into the top of one of the books and pulled on it until it toppled and fell into my arms.

  He motored over to a big table and opened the book on it. He had Jidney’s six-figure number beside him and started leafing through the pages of the book; looking over his shoulder I saw it was a volume of Ordnance Survey maps.

  ‘Did you find any maps like these in his pad when you turned it over?’

  I said no.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘here we are, let’s see what we’ve got.’ He was looking at a section of Kent countryside, halfway between Maidstone and Tonbridge. He put his finger on a wild-looking bit, murmuring: ‘Happens to be a part of the world I know, we used to picnic round there when I was a kid. We used to come down from London at weekends. Of course it was all real countryside in those days, though even now this bit doesn’t look much altered.’ He had his finger over a dense stretch of woodland. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘at least it makes sense.’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘Well, you can see that this is a map reference and that my finger’s on a church, can’t you?’ he said impatiently. ‘Here, have a look – this is it, off the M25. Here’s Sevenoaks over here, here’s Westerham, and now we’re out on the Edenbridge Road. Now here’s your church, and where you’ve a church you’re likely to have a vault. Lots of vaults. And my bet is that one of them is where he does all of them.’ He pushed the map across. ‘I don’t know what you could expect to find when you go down there, but I daresay he likes revisiting his old girlfriends – the shrinks call it the totem stage, going down to sit looking at the ivy, musing over old times, even digging a few of them over in sunny weather, having a wank – you know the funny kind of fun these funny people have.’

  18

  I rang the Factory from Ballard’s place and got through to Detective Chief Superintendent George Jollo. Due to old history, a matter of my being reinstated after my suspension at the end of a case in spite of his direct opposition, Jollo and I had never got on.

  ‘All right,’ he said when I arrived in his room, ‘I know about this crack-brained thing you’re on. And by the way, we’ve got a terrible woman here called Meredith making an uproar, is that anything to do with you?’

  ‘It certainly is,’ I said. ‘Now wake your ideas up and adjust your attitude, George, because her life’s in danger from a man connected to a Kent churchyard where at least one woman, and I’ve good reason to think a great many more, has died violently, by which I mean murdered.’

  ‘First things first!’ he shouted. ‘That can wait, I’ve also got DCI Bowman doing his nut over you.’

  ‘There’s no time to worry about him,’ I said, ‘and for Christ’s sake will you just forget the rule-book and take this seriously. If you think bringing Ann Meredith here is just a fuss about nothing, wait till you see a home movie I’ve got with me here – you’ll ruin your shirt-front.’ I threw the cassette on his desk.

  He said: ‘Where did that come from?’

  ‘I broke into a man’s flat and nicked it,’ I said.

  He threw his head back and laughed. ‘If I really thought you meant that,’ he said, ‘I’d bust you on the spot.’

  ‘I’ll tell you the truth then, George,’ I said mildly, ‘a fairy dropped it on her way overhead.’

  ‘All right, then,’ he said, ‘what’s in the fucking thing, anyway?’

  ‘Let’s go down to Records where they’ve got a video player and have a look,’ I said, ‘but I warn you the material it contains is horrific.’ Barry got us a video player and I put the cassette in, saying to Jollo: ‘I’m not too sure if I can watch this again, but I’ll try.’ When it was over I turned to Jollo; I thought he was going to faint.

  ‘First time round for you with snuff?’ I asked him.

  ‘No,’ he said. He was like a different man. ‘But it’s the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this before
, even at Poland Street.’

  ‘There are no words for it, are there?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Jollo. ‘All right, what do you need?’

  ‘I want a warrant for Ronald James Jidney, and an unmarked car in Thoroughgood Road with an intelligent crew in it. I shall have to take Stevenson with me into the house to make the arrest because Firth can’t – he’s no longer a police officer.’

  ‘Can you identify Jidney?’

  ‘We all can. I passed him on the stairs at Thoroughgood Road. Firth’s his neighbour. Meredith’s his girlfriend, and Records has got him on the books anyway.’

  ‘Are you going to show this film to the girlfriend?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘It would destroy her, and what good would that do? All it would prove to her is that Jidney really is a monster, and that will come out at his trial anyway, if he’s fit to plead. But what I am going to do when I bring Jidney in is to play it in front of him and in front of us and in front of his solicitor, and see if we can get him to make a statement.’

  ‘What are we going to do about Meredith?’

  ‘Keep her here until we’ve got Jidney, that’s vital – we can’t leave her unguarded while he’s running about. He must realise we’re after him by now as it is, but when he finds she’s left home as well he’s going to go fucking potty.’

  ‘I understand all right,’ said Jollo, ‘only I’ve got Chief Inspector Bowman screaming for men.’

  ‘He’s always screaming for men,’ I said, ‘he sends for the Flying Squad if some kid nicks a chocolate bar in a supermarket.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘Mind you do,’ I said, ‘because I’m in the business of saving life, not taking chances, and if Jidney thinks he’s got a chance he’ll be in there, and we’ve already got sixteen examples of what’ll happen then. But Meredith’s obstinate; she’s convinced she’s in love with this maniac and she hates being immobilised, but you’ll have to make her see sense. Anyway, catching Jidney shouldn’t take long – and meanwhile find that vault in Kent, you’ve got the map reference. Turn it right over when you get there – you might even find Jidney inside. But I’m going to wait for him at home.’