‘A vault,’ said Jollo, ‘of all places.’
‘It’s not stupid,’ I said, ‘that’s why he’s been killing scot-free for years. It’s only forty-four miles from London, isolated, room for the video, sound-proof, the victim can scream her head off and no one to hear, it’s perfect.’
‘Well, vandalising graves is all the rage nowadays,’ said Jollo, ‘this is just the new twist. Burke and Hare must be going mad wherever they are, they took out the patent.’
When the warrant arrived I got up and Jollo saw me to the door. ‘I’ve tried, but I’ve never liked you, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘What’s the use?’
‘You haven’t tried hard enough, George,’ I said, putting the warrant away, ‘the secret’s the same as with detective work, you’ve got to keep at it.’
19
I had to wait most of the afternoon while they got their car organised (the first one had a blue lamp on top and said ‘Police’ down the side) so I used the time for a final check on Ann Meredith, because I had long ago learned at Poland Street never to leave anything to run itself. It was a place like a government where you could never get hold of the people you really needed, whereas there were far too many people pounding up and down that you hadn’t ordered, and the more there were of those the likelier it was that some enthusiast with a bit of authority and not enough to do would make a balls-up of something or other if he got a chance.
I rang Jollo’s extension but it didn’t answer, so I got the desk to put me through to whoever was in the charge of his office. I waited. The longer I waited the less I liked it; it was the kind of silence that was police code for a cock-up, and a hollow feeling fell through my stomach and ended in my feet.
Finally a voice said: ‘Davidson.’
He was a DC I hardly knew. ‘Where’s Mr Jollo?’ I said.
‘He’s sitting in on an interrogation. Can I help you?’
‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘Give me an update on Ann Meredith and set my mind at rest.’
‘Meredith, Meredith . . . ’
‘Ann Meredith is a witness and probable next target of a multiple killer,’ I said. ‘She’s somewhere in this building in the charge of Mr Jollo, and I’m ringing to check she’s where she’s supposed to be.’
‘Hold on while I find out.’
He put the phone down; over the line I heard people moving about, the clatter of a tray; someone said something which ended with the words ‘a load of bollocks’, and there was some easy-going laughter.
When Davidson came back on the air again he said: ‘I’m sorry, but the surveillance on Ann Meredith has been taken off.’
Whatever I had been prepared for, it wasn’t that. I turned cold and said very slowly: ‘Would you just repeat that?’
He did so and added: ‘They said they hadn’t the men.’ He seemed to realise I wasn’t happy about it; I sensed him wincing over the phone.
‘Who gave the order?’ I said.
‘That I couldn’t tell you.’ He added: ‘I can assure you it didn’t come from this office.’
‘Then you can count on still being alive tomorrow,’ I said, ‘but the berk responsible for this fuck-up won’t be so lucky.’
I knew she wouldn’t be there, but I dialled Meredith’s home number for the sake of something to do while I pulled myself together. I knew what the answer would be – no answer – and I was not only right but, far worse, the number was unobtainable. The lump in my stomach now turned to lead; I redialled Poland Street and asked for Jollo again. This time I got him, asked him about Meredith, and when I had the same answer as I’d had from Davidson I kept my voice down somehow and said: ‘Before we go any further, has this got anything to do with Charlie Bowman?’
When he didn’t say no I said: ‘Wait till I get hold of that salaried murderer, but don’t let’s bother with that now. Have you tried ringing Meredith? Well, do it and ring me back, I’m downstairs in 202.’
When he rang back I said: ‘Did you get the same answer as I did, unobtainable? Yes? Well someone had better get to that flat faster than five minutes ago, and if there’s been a death over there I can tell you that whoever’s responsible for it is going to get killed over here.’
‘DCI Bowman takes precedence over you, Sergeant,’ said Jollo, ‘that’s what rank means.’
‘If he’s responsible for turning sixteen deaths into seventeen,’ I said, ‘he’ll be working out what rank means on his way to the cemetery.’
‘He decided to take Stevenson off Meredith and let her go home, which was what Meredith wanted anyway.’
I didn’t bother to answer that. ‘Where is Stevenson now, anyway?’
‘Over at Southall,’ said Jollo, ‘I hate to say I told you so.’
For the first time in my life I actually tried to pull some of my hair out. ‘You mean Bowman’s put him on another case?’ I said. ‘But Meredith was top priority – I’d got clearance right the way down from the Voice, and you know it.’
‘Just a minute,’ said Jollo, ‘I’ve got a call on the other line.’ He came back to me and said in a low voice: ‘I’ve got an officer here who’d like a word with you, I’ll put you through.’
It was a police patrol car driver. He sounded shaken. ‘We received a call from the neighbours of this Miss Meredith over here at Maida Vale – we couldn’t get an answer ringing the bell so we broke in.’
‘And she’s dead,’ I said.
‘It’s worse than just that,’ he said, ‘it’s terrible, worst I’ve ever seen. You’d better come over.’
The street door of Ann Meredith’s block of flats was wide open, and there was a squad car outside. I saw the sergeant in charge and identified myself. In the hallway downstairs a middle-aged woman in a flowered dressing-gown was being comforted by a policewoman; when she turned to me I saw there was a big bruise on her cheekbone, fresh.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘what happened?’
The WPC said to the witness: ‘I know it’s painful, but could you manage to repeat to this officer what you told us?’
It didn’t take long. The witness had heard a series of screams from Meredith’s flat and had come down to see what was going on – she wondered if she had perhaps hurt herself or anyway had some kind of accident. She had seen no one come into the house, yet as she arrived at Meredith’s door it was wrenched open, and a man in dark clothes wearing a black woollen cap and carrying an iron bar had torn out, clobbered her and run out into the street, turning left at the corner, she thought. She wasn’t sure, she had her hands up to her face. Immediately afterwards she had heard a car starting – she hadn’t got a sight of the car, of course.
‘All right,’ I told her, ‘get some rest till the ambulance comes, you’re lucky to be alive.’ I said to the sergeant: ‘You’re the scene of crime officer. Have you been into the flat yet?’
‘I’m going in now.’
‘I’d like to come with you.’
‘All right. If you don’t disturb anything.’
Inside, Meredith’s flat was dark and the blinds were drawn. In a corner the phone had been ripped out of the wall and thrown across the room; in another corner lay what looked like a bundle of dirty clothes. The bundle of clothes looked surprisingly small for a body, but that was because it was lying with its knees up in its stomach and had its face, partly covered with a blanket, turned to the wall. I went and knelt down by Meredith; I moved the blanket slightly with the sergeant’s permission and found that the head was nearly off, the neck cut through to the spinal column by the strokes of a knife. The violence was so recent that its aura was still as loud in the room as a last sharp word, together with the iron smell of blood. There was blood all over the walls and floor, too, and the blouse which the killer had ripped off the dead woman and thrown into a corner on top of the ripped-out telephone was sodden with it. There was a frenzy in this murder even more marked than in the o
ther I had seen on the cassette – evidence of a helter-skelter fury in the way the body had been violated and objects hurled and scattered everywhere, as though the perpetrator sensed that we were within reaching distance of him and had succumbed to his rage and terror, his hatred bursting his disguises of outward normality, his assumed nice-guy personality exploding together with Ann Meredith’s life.
I took Meredith’s head in my hands and turned it gently towards me. My hands were immediately covered with blood; the sight reminded me of my dream about the dead man outside the town of Jer. She had no face left to speak of; nothing remained but a red pulp with moist blue-white splinters of bone – nose, jaw, forehead – projecting from it. Now I also noticed how the black skirt she wore had been hauled up round her waist, and that something was protruding from her behind. This object was also bloody and there was a smear of drying semen at my end; I saw it to be the snapped off part of a broom-handle.
‘You were angry with her, weren’t you, Ron?’ I whispered as I looked down at her. ‘You weren’t going to have her getting away from you, were you, so you went and topped her and made her number seventeen, because I have started to seriously fuck you about and you don’t like it, do you?’ As I put her head down again carefully, there was a horrible soft feeling about it as it touched the floor.
The scene of crime officer came out of the bedroom. He pointed behind him and said: ‘She was sexually assaulted in here. There’s sperm all over the bottom sheet.’ I joined him and leaned over the shambles of the bed, staring at what Italians call the little map of love.
‘He didn’t half get his rocks off when he did come, the old darling,’ said the officer.
‘I’ve got to catch him,’ I said, ‘and do it fast; he’s completely unstable now, out of control. He’s angry and upset. He’s had to abandon his precious routine. He’s let his temper get on top of him, he’s killed in haste because he was thwarted; he didn’t get his ritual, couldn’t take her to the vault, nothing – he’s all unsatisfied, well choked.’
‘Then he’ll make more mistakes from now on, with a bit of luck.’
‘But they won’t bring Ann Meredith back,’ I said, and I felt bad at having thought of her as an obstinate, irritating person – at ever having been so petty.
20
I was standing with Stevenson a hundred yards down the street from twenty-three Thoroughgood Road.
Stevenson said: ‘Are you going straight up there?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m going to sit there and wait for him. If he’s picked up down in Kent or anywhere else let me know – but my bet is he’ll come here, because there are items upstairs he hasn’t collected that he can’t afford to let us find.’
Firth joined us. ‘You need me up in that room? You’d better have back-up.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Just the shock that my being there will give Jidney, that’ll be back-up enough.’
‘You armed?’
‘I never go armed,’ I said. ‘I only ever went armed once in my life, and that was for Tony Spavento.’
‘You could wait a long time for Jidney,’ Firth said.
‘I tell you he’s got stuff up there that he’s got to move,’ I said, standing up, ‘and he hasn’t much time to do it in. But I’ve got all my time.’
Upstairs I sat in the dark, in Jidney’s armchair in his sitting-room with my back to the window, facing the door. I sat there, completely still, wondering, not what was going to happen now, but how it would happen, and how soon, my tongue like a ball of fluff that had smouldered out in my mouth, and I picked at a crust made by fear at the corner of my lips.
When would it happen? When would he come? In a minute, an hour? I had the floorboards up, all ready, and the six tins with the souvenirs laid out on the joists for us to have a chat over, just the two of us together. I could have had Stevenson arrest him in the street, and by the book I should have, or I could have had Stevenson in the room with me and should have, but I didn’t want that; I wanted just Ron and me to be together. So I left Stevenson down in the street with the others and had arranged for them to come up if I switched a light on, or to kick the door in if they heard anything loud going wrong, such as a gun being fired.
Jidney had to come in and try to get his souvenirs. Over the last decades he had got lazy, perhaps even indifferent to discovery, believing, as most of those people did, that the high jump could never happen to him; he could easily have stopped thinking about that possibility. But as for me, I sat there with my immediate and unknowable future going round and round in my head – how it would happen, and what my fate would be wearing when it entered, what Jidney might have in his hand when he came through the door. I looked at my watch; it said five past seven. It could have said five past eternity and I wouldn’t have noticed; the cheap dial looked white as a frightened face on my arm when I held it to the street light to watch the quartz-driven second hand drifting coldly past the numerals, leaving time behind.
Nothing in the room moved; the whole world was silent except where far off, too far for me, on a different planet, a police car’s siren screamed on the trail of a different errand with a noise like the devil’s joy.
I was afraid. I knew, I had often been told, that fear evaporated when you faced it, and I just hoped the people who had told me that were right. The way I live you always think you’ve considered death from every possible angle, but when your number crops up it always turns out that you never have.
This fear I had now wouldn’t go away because it was part of me; I felt it would only leave when I took it by the hand and left with it. But how can you be separated from what you’re a part of? This must be what the dying feel, when mind and body are together, and for the first time so far off. I would have given anything to have Ballard, Stevenson, Cruddie with me now. But all I had was the buttons of Jidney’s brown armchair cushions sticking into me as I forced myself just to listen and sit still.
Cold blood, cold turkey; now that I was in it I would rather have died suddenly, in a fight, than have this contest come up on me silently, on its own patch, at an unknown hour; even though I had wanted it, now that it was nearly on top of me I found I didn’t want it at all. So I passed the time trying, too late, to get to know my soul and draw comfort from my dead, from Dahlia, from my father.
My father said that the hardest thing in life was the first thing – to think of others in a world that taught you to think of yourself. But he said it was worth it, and now I believed I knew what he meant all right – that if you didn’t understand people you didn’t exist. I was paid to catch people who didn’t exist; the people whose shoulders I tapped left only the dead behind them.
Now memories of my father fled past me and I tried to catch them. He had been a clerk in a South London drapery store and had volunteered, over-age, to defuse mines; but our last talk had been in the hospital. A nurse with a stiff face and a healthy body rustling inside her starch came with morphine for him, trying not to show she prayed, and my father, swollen but propped up and comfortably trapped in bed with the cancer in his groin told me at last how it had been on the commando training course in Scotland in ’41, and how he had come back to my mother with his lieutenant’s pips up before he had gone down to North Africa to clear up the German mines, striding through the door and dumping his cap and holdall by the gas fire at our two-up, two-down in Lewisham to say, tanned-looking and surprised: ‘Well, it’s a change from selling knickers in SE12 – first and last commissioned officer you’ll find in this family.’ He gasped with laughter at the white walls as he told me this, rattling on about his first night’s leave; he also told me that was the night my sister Julie was conceived.
He also told me for the first time that the morning it was his turn to get down to the beach to tackle a real mine it wasn’t like the classroom any more at all where he had been prepared with fifteen other young men wearing cadets’ white tapes, notepads placed exactly
in front of them on the desks of the requisitioned grammar school, listening gravely to a mining engineer turned colonel as he explained percussion caps, detonators and the required strength of charges, the exact lengths of wire and the strength of batteries the enemy used. Reality was nothing after the first reality, my father said; reality was the first mine you tackled, and if you survived that first reality it never really came back, much as a multiple murderer’s real pleasure is only his first. My father said that reality never returned if you already knew what to do about it and knew more or less how it was going to be, because the novelty and terror of death, the blinding explosion, like first love, had already come and gone.
He told me he had surprised himself. He had not known he could do it, tackling these objects that were as cold and passive as himself. The people from the War Office sat perched on shooting-sticks at a safe distance under the dunes while the sea roared greyly in and the Guards major stared down the shore at him through his binoculars and wrote things on a clipboard; and he had come through the whole war without a scratch to die, not blown to bits by any exterior device, but demolished from inside his own body by a melanoma, which had begun as a black stain on his back and followed him to his groin where it burst through his thigh – finally nothing more alien than his own flesh had undone him.
I too, in my own way, was a defuser of mines, and now it was my turn to be alone, sitting in a chair above a different form of death that I was constructed to find and beat; I was in terror’s own front room, my performance no doubt being noted on a different form of clipboard whose observations could not save me if anything went wrong; I felt a pen scratching my judgment in a different part of my head where the text-book logic of my brain and the silence of the room were. Now it was my turn to sit in death’s own chair that offered me its worn arms beside the gaping floorboards which had hidden flesh turned to vaguely smelling filth by the man I was waiting for. I thought, well, come soon, even if as a result I’m just absent and so no longer obliged to care; at worst, the great load will have gone, the cup swallowed and removed, the deal over.
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