Necrocrip

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  The bricks of the front elevation were blackened with the soot of ages, the paint was peeling off the window frames, and the battered front door had been painted in that one shade of blue which evokes no emotional response at all in the human soul, and which presumably goes on being produced by paint manufacturers through sheer force of habit. Slider trod carefully up the uneven path and rang the bell, setting off a fusillade of barks from somewhere inside.

  The occupants of the lower floor were at home. Inside the street door was a tiny hall, about three feet square, with a door straight ahead – across the stairs, of course –and another to the left, leading directly into what had been the best parlour of the original house. Slider was invited in with an eagerness which suggested their lives were yawningly lacking in incident. They sat him down on a sagging sofa upholstered in much-stained orange-and-brown synthetic tweed, pulled the dog off him, and offered him tea.

  The room smelled of old tobacco and old carpets and damp and dog. As well as the sofa there were two equally repulsive armchairs, a coffee table decorated with overflowing ashtrays, a large television set, and a clothes horse on which a wash was drying – a faded blue tee-shirt and a vast quantity of grey underwear. Perhaps to help the drying process, the two-bar electric fire was on, making the room stiflingly warm and bringing out the full, ripe bouquet of the various smells. On the television Michael Fish was demonstrating the action of an occluded front, and from another room came the sound of disc-jockey babble from a radio. The dog, denied the sexual gratification of Slider’s leg, walked round in short circles by the door, barking monotonously.

  ‘It’s about Peter upstairs, is it?’

  ‘Do you take milk and sugar?’

  ‘ … some bits and pieces of rain, working their way slowly across central areas …’

  ‘No, no tea, thank you.’

  ‘D’you smoke at all? Chuck us the fags, Bet. Ta, love.’

  ‘… tending pretty much to fizzle out, really, by the time …’

  ‘Shut up, Shane! Ooh, can’t you put him out in the kitchen, Garry?’

  ‘Sorry about this, he gets a bit excited. C’mere you stupid bastard!’

  ‘ … not nearly as much as is needed, I’m afraid, particularly in the south east…’

  ‘I could make you coffee instead, if you like?’

  The dog suddenly hairpinned itself and sank its teeth into an itch at the root of its tail.

  ‘No, really, thank you, not for me,’ Slider said into the decibel vacuum. ‘I had a cup just before I came out. I wonder if you’d mind turning the television off, just while we talk?’

  They looked at each other a little blankly, as though the request had come out of left field, barely comprehensible.

  ‘I’ll turn it down,’ Garry said at last, coming to a management decision.

  ‘Only it’s Neighbours in a minute,’ Bet added anxiously.

  The dog finished with its tail and resumed barking, standing still now and staring at the ceiling in a way that suggested it was really going to concentrate this time on making a good job of it. Garry turned the sound down on the television and Michael Fish mouthed silently from behind the glass, sweeping one hand with underwater slowness to indicate the Grampians.

  ‘Oh take him out, Garry. Shut him in the kitchen for a bit.’

  The closing of the kitchen door muted both dog and deejay, and in the blessed near-silence which followed, Slider asked his host and hostess about the upstairs tenant.

  ‘He’s a nice boy, Peter – quiet, you know,’ Bet offered. ‘He’s not been here long. There was that couple before—’

  ‘Pakis,’ Garry mouthed, nodding significantly at Slider. ‘Not that I mind,’ he added hastily, ‘but they had this baby, cried all the time. And then there was the rows – you never heard nothing like it, all in Swahili or whatever it is—’

  ‘You can hear everything down here,’ Bet said with breathless emphasis. ‘It’s as thin as paper, that ceiling. Even anybody walking about, let alone shouting at each other.’

  ‘And the smell of them curries morning noon and night’

  Slider intervened before they got too carried away. ‘So how long has Peter Leman been living there?’

  ‘Oh, it’s – what—?’ They looked at each other again.

  ‘Three months? About that.’

  ‘Four months. Febry, it was. That’s when he came.’

  ‘Febry’s three months.’

  ‘Nearly four. It was the beginning of Febry.’

  ‘Do you know where he lived before?’

  Garry shook his head sadly, as though loath to deny Slider anything. ‘Not to say exactly. Well, Bet talked to him more than me. Did he say where, Bet?’

  ‘No-o,’ Bet said reluctantly, ‘not really. Not inasmuch as where, so to speak. But I think it was somewhere in London. He speaks like a Londoner, anyway.’

  ‘What does he do for a living, do you know?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Unemployed,’ Garry said tersely. ‘Well, who isn’t these days?’

  ‘Well he has just got himself a casual job,’ Bet qualified. ‘Evenings behind the bar at the Green Man, on the corner. He only started there last week. But Fridays and Saturdays he helps out at this fish and chip shop, doesn’t he, Garry?’

  ‘You’d think they’d be the busiest times at the pub,’ Slider said.

  ‘Oh, he said about that,’ Garry said eagerly. ‘He said they asked him to do Fridays and Sat’days, and the money would’ve been better, but he couldn’t let these other people down. But if you ask me, he’s scared it might get rough.’

  ‘Well, he’s only little,’ Bet said defensively, as though it had been an accusation. ‘I don’t blame him. He isn’t much bigger than me, and some of them kids that go in there of a weekend – you know, lager louts and that—’

  ‘Doesn’t want to spoil his face,’ Garry grunted disparagingly.

  ‘Well he is a nice-looking boy,’ Bet said.

  ‘What does he look like? Can you describe him to me?’

  But Neighbours had come on, and Bet’s attention slithered resisdessly to the screen. Garry answered distractedly, watching it sideways. ‘Well, he’s a short bloke, about five-six or seven, I s’pose. Dark hair.’

  ‘Thin or fat?’

  ‘Slim. But he’s fit. I see him jogging and that, sometimes. He’s like, athletic, you might say.’

  ‘Clean shaven?’

  ‘What, you mean, like, does he have a beard? No, nothing like that.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘I dunno really. He looks about twenty-five. Good-looking bloke, like Bet says. Smiles a lot. He’s got nice teeth,’ Garry added.

  Slider thought of Freddie’s words: he had a fine set of gnashers. So far it was looking good. ‘Does he have any friends? Anyone that visits him here?’

  ‘He has a girlfriend,’ Garry said. ‘What’s her name, Suzanne.’

  Bet came to, dragging her eyes away from the screen. ‘I don’t think she’s his girlfriend, Gow,’ she said earnestly. ‘I think she must be his sister. Only I’ve never spoken to her,’ she explained to Slider, ‘but I see them come in together sometimes, and she doesn’t sort of act like a girlfriend.’

  ‘And when did you last see him?’ Slider asked quickly, now he had her attention.

  ‘Well, I see him go out Monday, to the pub. About half-past five that’d be,’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘Did you see him come in again?’

  ‘No,’ she said regretfully.

  ‘But we heard him,’ Garry added proudly. ‘He come in about – what would it be—?’

  ‘Half-past eleven?’

  ‘Nearer quarter to twelve,’ Garry corrected. ‘We heard him bang the door and walk upstairs. Then we heard him, like, walking about up there.’

  ‘Was he alone?’

  Garry shrugged. ‘We didn’t hear no-one else.’

  ‘When I took the dog out, about ten minutes later, just in the front garden, I saw his light on in his front room
,’ Bet offered.

  ‘And what about Tuesday? Did you see him go out on Tuesday?’

  ‘Never saw him, but I heard him come down the stairs. Whisding, he was. And then he banged the door. You have to bang it – it sticks a bit.’

  ‘We never heard him come in from the pub, though,’ Garry said.

  ‘And when I took the dog out, there was no light up there,’ Bet added.

  ‘We haven’t heard any moving about up there, either, not since. And the gas man came yesterday morning to read the meters, and he didn’t answer his door, so he couldn’t have been in. I said to Bet, I reckon he’s done a bunk, didn’t I, Bet?’

  But Bet’s eyes had slid back to the magic screen. A fair-haired young woman with her hands on her hips was plainly telling a firm-jawed young man what she thought of him, while the firm-jawed young man picked sulkily at the back of a sofa, waiting his chance to justify himself. In the kitchen the dog had reached a peak of hysteria and was scrabbling at the closed door with its nails. Garry was lighting a fresh cigarette from the butt of the current one, and the smoke was lying in strata from the ceiling down almost to the level of the washing.

  ‘Could I use your telephone, please?’ Slider asked.

  *

  The landlord of the Green Man was tall, thin, and sour. His hair was dyed black, and lay reluctantly in separate strands over his skull. His skin was grey, his nose mottled blue, and his eyes congested yellow, and he spoke without moving his lips, as though to open them would be to give away too much of his precious breath.

  ‘I never liked him from the start,’ he pronounced. ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘Nothing, as far as I know,’ Slider countered. ‘Why don’t you like him?’

  ‘Too clever-clever. College boy type. I knew he wouldn’t stay.’

  ‘He’s a college boy?’

  ‘I said “type”. Thinks he knows everything. Lahdidah accent. I said to myself, this one won’t stay. He won’t want to soil his hands. But he was so keen on the job I took him on against my judgement.’

  ‘Did he come to work on time on Tuesday?’

  ‘Came on time. Then springs it on me that he wants to go off early. Says he’s got to meet his sister off some plane at Heathrow. Well, we were quiet, so I said he could go, though I had my doubts. Starting the old nonsense already, I thought – and I was right. He left here at half-past nine, and that’s the last I saw of him.’

  ‘He hasn’t been in to work since?’

  ‘He has not.’ The yellowed eyes met Slider’s reluctantly. ‘He’s got wages owing. Well, he can have them if he comes for them.’ He seemed to regret even this momentary lapse into kindness, and tightened his lips more grimly in compensation. ‘Too clever by half, that one. He mended my bar video that’s been on the blink for a fortnight –knows his way round a circuit board all right. What’s a bloke like that doing behind a bar, I ask you? I knew he wouldn’t stay.’

  By the time Slider got back to the maisonette; Atherton had arrived.

  ‘Shall I break in, or you?’ he asked politely.

  ‘You do it so nicely, dear,’ Slider said.

  ‘You’re going to get me into trouble one of these days,’ Atherton grumbled, bending to examaine the lock.

  Slider told Atherton what he had learned so far while they looked round. The upper flat was small and dingy, with all the muted horror of a furnished let: nasty wallpaper, nastier carpets, and furniture the nastiest of all. The bottom door let straight onto the stairs, which were narrow and steep. At the top was a tiny half-landing, dominated by a mess of meters and fuse-boxes which seemed in imminent danger of pulling the sagging plaster off the wall. A doorway without a door led to what had originally been the bathroom of the house, and was now a kitchen. It had been divided down its length with a partition wall, behind which a bath, hand-basin and lavatory were crammed into the smallest possible space. From the half-landing four steps led on up to two doors, the bedrooms of the original house, now a bedroom and sitting-room.

  The rooms gave every sign of expecting their owner back. In the bedroom the bed was unmade, the duvet flung back from a wrinkled undersheet; wardrobe and drawers were full of clothes, and there were two suitcases, one on top of the wardrobe and one under the bed. He had not packed and gone, that was for sure.

  On the kitchen table a coffee mug, a crumby plate and knife, a pat of butter and ajar of Marmite bore witness to a last meal – Tuesday’s tea? – and there was food in the fridge: milk, eggs, tomatoes, bacon, a pack of French beans, a packet of lamb cudets – Wednesday’s dinner?

  In the sitting-room there were newspapers lying around – Monday’s Evening Standard folded to the jobs page and Tuesday’s Guardian – and a copy of a paperback Dick Francis was lying on the floor half under the sofa, face down and open at page thirty-six. On the small table there was a half bottle of whisky and a tumbler with a screwed-up crisp packet stuffed in it, and a brown apple core lay in a glass ashtray on the hearth. The television showed a red light, having been turned off from the remote control instead of at the switch.

  Yet all the evidence the flat provided was negative. Peter Leman seemed to receive no mail but junk mail. He kept no diary or address book. His books were few, paperback bestsellers. He kept no personal papers in the house, no letters, bills or anything of that sort. The flat gave the appearance of a temporary home.

  ‘It’s like a student’s term-time place,’ Atherton said. ‘You get the feeling that there are parents somewhere with a bedroom full of his personal gear. I mean, where’s all the normal silt of life?’

  ‘He hadn’t been here very long,’ Slider reminded him.

  ‘Why was he here at all?’ Atherton asked, dissatisfied. ‘Because it’s cheap, I suppose. Maybe he quarrelled with his parents.’

  ‘Over being homosexual?’

  ‘We don’t know that he was. There’s the possible girlfriend. And we don’t know that Leman was the corpse or that the corpse was the man Slaughter took to his room, or that the man Slaughter took to his room was Leman.’

  ‘We don’t know much, and that’s a fact,’ Slider agreed placidly, amused by his bagman’s growing irritation.

  They were almost ready to give up when they found, inside a copy of the London A to Z, a snapshot of a slim, dark-haired young man in jeans and tee-shirt with his arm round a fair-haired, smiling young woman. Pencilled on the inside of the cover of the A to Z, there was also a telephone number. Slider tried it while Atherton took the photograph down to Garry and Bet. He returned a few minutes later.

  ‘It’s Peter Leman all right. And that’s his girlfriend stroke sister—’

  ‘Suzanne.’

  ‘La même. Any luck with the number?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ Slider said. ‘It’s the number of the payphone in the hall of the house where Slaughter lives.’

  Atherton brightened. ‘But then, that proves—’

  ‘At ease,’ Slider said. ‘We already know he knows Slaughter. He works at the shop, remember?’

  ‘Curse! If there were any justice in this world, it would have been Suzanne’s number,’ Atherton grumbled. ‘And you realise there could be any number of reasons why he’s not come home?’

  ‘Patience, lad. One step at a time. At least we’ve got the photograph.’

  ‘It’s the littlest least you’ve ever asked me to be glad about,’ Atherton said.

  ‘God, this is good!’ Slider murmured. He was lying in post-coital bliss on Joanna’s saggy old Chesterfield, with Joanna curled up in his arms. Elgar’s Second Symphony, which had been on when he arrived, was coming to its close.

  ‘Mmm,’ she agreed. ‘Did you know that an interviewer once asked Barbirolli: if he could nominate the last notes of the last music he would ever conduct, what would he choose? And he chose this.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about the music. But still – I can relate to that, as the Americans say.’

  ‘Oh God, that reminds me – there was a sort of stage manager person at the
Carnegie Hall, and whenever something went wrong, he’d come mincing up and enquire politely, ‘Is there a concern here?’ It made Charlie foam—’

  ‘Charlie?’

  ‘My desk partner. He’s an irascible old scrote with a very low pain threshold when it comes to language.’

  ‘He seems to be cropping up in your conversation a good deal.’

  She stretched up to kiss his chin. ‘You can’t be jealous of Charlie,’ she decreed. ‘Just not possibly.’

  ‘I can be as irrational as the next man when I put my mind to it.’

  ‘I work with him, that’s all.’

  ‘I work with Atherton.’

  ‘What makes you think I’m not jealous of Atherton? You spend a lot more time with him than with me.’

  He hugged her. ‘Ah, but I mean to do something about that.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ she said derisively, though without heat.

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘Of course you do,’ she agreed. ‘But not just yet. What’s the excuse this time? Irene isn’t involved in any school plays and the children haven’t got chickenpox or exams coming up.’ His own excuses, handed back to him out of context, sounded embarrassingly threadbare. Oh, I forgot, you’ve got a big case on, of course. That should be good for a few months.’

  ‘Sarcasm is an unlovely trait,’ he observed.

  She kissed him again, contritely. ‘I know. I didn’t mean it. I’m just talking to hear myself talk.’

  ‘You’ve every right, though. I’ve kept you waiting far too long. It’s because—’

  ‘It’s because you’re a Libra, and see every side of every situation,’ she supplied for him.

  ‘All the same, I was thinking about us the other night, and I saw it all very clearly. Case or no case, I’m going to speak to Irene the very first opportunity.’

  She still wasn’t taking him seriously. ‘What constitutes an opportunity?’