As I sat in my hard-cushioned armchair, nursing a last Bell’s while Barbara got ready for bed, I realized that if I’d been a free agent, if it hadn’t been for Staniland, his cassettes and his writing, I would either have gone overboard for Barbara, which would have been all too easy for me, or else said woodenly, look, I’m a copper investigating a death, and got insults or silence. I would have felt better if I had, but I had to unravel what had happened to Staniland, and the fact that I interested her physically opened up the best route. Even so I felt dirty, like any double agent. It might take nerve and acting ability to be a double agent, but that didn’t get the dirt off.
I heard her moving out of the bathroom into the bedroom, and smelled soap and steam. Then I heard her rustling between the sheets in the dark.
‘Come on,’ she said. I found I was by the bed, pulling off my clothes in furious haste to get in there with her. My body felt no scruples, anyway.
‘Easy, easy,’ she said after a while. ‘It’s happening to me.’
‘Are we going to a club again tomorrow?’ she said.
‘We’ll have breakfast, take our time over it, and then decide.’
‘I thought you said you were going to work.’
‘Not today. I’m taking the day off. I’ll go into the office and explain. I’ll have to go in, I’ve got some work to clear up, then we’ll meet at lunchtime.’
‘All right,’ she said sleepily.
‘We’ll have lunch together. I’ll tell you where we can meet. Do you like Indian?’
‘How did you know I liked Indian?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe because I like it.’
She said: ‘I could almost kill you, you know. I had one. An orgasm.’
‘I know you did.’
‘You’re not like the no-hopers I usually get.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘don’t say any more now. We’ll talk later.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I want to sleep now; just don’t let go of me till I sleep.’
23
When I got up at seven-thirty Barbara was still sleeping, her head on her arm, lying on her right side. I left a note on the pillow telling her to meet me in the Quadrant at one, and added the address. Then I went out into the river-cold street and took a cab back to the 84.
I found my car where I had left it, just as a traffic warden was writing me out a ticket. He was a young man with mild blue eyes and the beginnings of a beard.
‘Save it, son,’ I said, ‘it’s a police vehicle.’
‘That’s what they all say.’
‘Some of us mean it.’ I showed him my identification.
‘Well, I’ve made the ticket out now,’ he said. ‘It’s too late once I’ve started making it out. Sorry, Sarge.’
‘The man you want to apologize to,’ I said, ‘is the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It’s him who’ll be six quid out at the end of the financial year.’
‘Well, the vehicle wasn’t marked.’
‘There’s a silly reason for that,’ I said, taking the ticket. ‘It’s because a lot of these modern villains can read.’
I drove over to Poland Street and left the Ford in the police parking lot. Then I went round to the front of the building and barged in through the main doors just like a criminal with a complaint. I said good morning to people as I made for the stairs, but they saw me so rarely that nobody recognized me except the desk sergeant.
I was running upstairs to the second floor where my office was when I banged into Bowman.
‘Christ, it’s you,’ he said. ‘You still on that Staniland case?’
‘Still?’ I said. ‘I’ve only been on it four days.’
‘Four days? You should have had the geezer in half the time. You’ll be working weekends if you don’t pull your finger out.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘If you solved them that fast, they’d start stripping you down for the microchips to find out how you did it.’
‘How are you getting on with it, anyhow?’
‘I can’t get my proof,’ I said. ‘You know me—slow, quick, quick, slow, Mr Foxtrot they call me. That’s why I’m still a sergeant while you’re shaping up for superintendent on the Vice Squad. All I can say is, when it happens, don’t get done for looking at dirty pictures on the taxpayer’s time.’
‘You really make me laugh, you do,’ Bowman said. ‘You come out with better jokes than a villain.’ He continued: ‘Now listen, I’m serious for once. You’re a good copper—you can’t stay on at A14 forever. Why don’t you give it up and move over to Serious Crimes with us? Do yourself a bit of good. Come on, I could get you the transfer.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘You hate my guts, is that it?’
‘It’s nothing to do with that. If everyone only worked with people they liked, you wouldn’t have a police force. No, I told you, I like being independent, I like working my own way.’
‘Christ,’ said Bowman, ‘as if I didn’t know it—I’m not sure you wouldn’t be better off with MI6 or the Branch, you’re so fond of cover. My life, you’re too fond of it—you hardly surface long enough to get a pay rise, let alone promotion.’
‘Every time you talk about promotion,’ I said, ‘you go all starry-eyed like a trendy writer dreaming about a CBE.’
That was what always happened between me and Bowman. We’d start off trying to be nice to each other and then, before you could say Fraud Squad, we’d be at each other’s throats again. It was a lucky thing we didn’t run into each other too often, as I say; it would probably have ended in murder.
‘You stink with the grot of that Staniland case,’ he said, sniffing at me. ‘You smell as if you’d come straight out of a tart’s parlour.’ I couldn’t tell him what a neat bit of detection that was. ‘What I say is, get a transfer over to us. I’ll help you—but I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself.’
‘I’m not going to get a flat tyre if I don’t make inspector,’ I said.
‘Just as well,’ said Bowman, ‘because you’ve got no chance at all at A14. I can’t think of a single man who’s made it past sergeant at Unexplained Deaths, and I just don’t see why you try so bloody hard.’
‘It’s because I don’t like middle-aged drunks being battered to death.’
‘Then if I were you,’ said Bowman, ‘I’d get hold of the people you’ve been interviewing by the short hairs and really grip them. Frighten the shit out of them. Somebody must be lying—somebody’s always lying. So get some wind in your bellows and give it a bit of puff; the organ’ll soon start playing.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but completely out of tune. This is a case where you’ve got to tease the truth out, not beat it with a club.’
‘Tease the truth out?’ said Bowman. He barked with laughter. ‘You’ll be at it for ninety-nine years. I get a conviction the quick way. I get results, don’t I, Sergeant?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but there’s five of you.’
We parted on a bad note, as usual. I went into my office and slammed the door.
I sat down at my desk in Room 205, a pastime I was not fond of. But it was peaceful in there, and I needed some peace. All round me I could hear the Factory pounding away, working. People shouted at each other, the boots of police clerks tramped down the corridor. I spent a quarter of an hour thinking about Barbara with my elbows on the desk and my chin in my hands. I gazed at the police posters on the walls that warned you to look out, there was a thief about, and what to do in the event of the Thames flooding. I stared at the uncomfortable chair that I sat people in to be interrogated, at the Ministry of Works radiator painted sickroom green, and the vase of flowers on the table where another copper sat as evidence of what had been said. Nothing was being said in Room 205 today, and the flowers had been dead for weeks. I didn’t even know who had put them there—possibly Brenda, the police constable who gave me looks sometimes. I thought about her legs, which were good, once she’d got her regulation shoes off, but immediately visualized Barbara�
��s body on top of them.
I thought with some bitterness about Bowman. He headed his team at Serious Crimes; he solved his cases practically by committee. I admitted he had to have help; the majority of his cases were headlines in the national press. Yet at the same time he took less individual responsibility. If Bowman dropped a bollock, he could usually blame someone under him, but in any case the shit finally fell on the Commissioner, or a Chief Constable if it was a provincial case. But in my cases, the whole lot fell on me. I accepted that, but it got up my nose at times, especially when I was tired, like today.
Headlines got me back to thinking about Staniland again. There had been eight lines about him in the Standard on Monday, and that was all. The Sundays hadn’t touched it—why should they? There wasn’t a headline to be got out of him, nothing like ‘I Was Raped, Screamed Spanish Waiter’, or any of that routine. A middle-aged drunk is found battered to death in some bushes out in West Five. No angle? No espionage? No rake-offs, pay-offs? No thousand-pound roll of dirty fivers in his mac pocket? No sex angle? No weeping girl-friend, kiddies or old mum? I could hear the editors saying, Scrub it, when it came in on the telex. It wasn’t as if it were rape, multiple homicide committed by a rampaging nut with a stolen antique battleaxe, kidnapping, vast-scale bank fraud or political mayhem with the SAS and the Branch involved. Every time I thought about the Branch I felt bitter, because I had once applied to join it. I had been accepted and then suddenly turned down after passing the interview without being told why (they never told you things like that). I suspected it had to do with my divorce. People like Bowman didn’t know I had ever applied, but it was on my record somewhere—everything was on your record, down to the last time you’d put on clean underwear.
Well, I made the best of it. I was divorced. Exactly. I didn’t need the extra money promotion would have brought. I had my flat out at Earlsfield, a motor and a colour TV—what more did a single man want? Besides, as I’d told Bowman, I had the kind of mentality that enjoyed the work at A14. Every so often, too, you turned up something interesting and delicate, starting with something quite banal.
But Staniland wasn’t one of those cases.
‘Between you and me,’ Bowman had said, ‘Staniland is one of the most boring cases I ever heard of.’
I didn’t agree with him. At least two people, his widow and Viner at the BBC, cared a lot about what had happened to Staniland—three people, if you counted me. For me, Staniland wasn’t just another body in the morgue. Through his writing and his cassettes he was still alive as far as I was concerned. I had started to think, dream, almost be Staniland by proxy, even before I had met Barbara. Now, because of my relationship with her I, like Staniland himself, was being twisted into a new, more complex shape.
I knew it was dangerous, but I was becoming obsessed with Barbara; I could still fall in love with her if I didn’t look out.
I imagined the headline in the Police News: ‘Detective Sergeant Weds South London Club Hostess’, and winced.
Pity it would never happen—I’d have asked Bowman to be best man.
24
I surveyed the lunchtime mob in the Quadrant. The advertising people with their flannels, crew-cuts and executive briefcases stood at the more elegant bar; next to them, but not speaking to them, was the rag-trade contingent over from Great Portland Street. Both armies were attended by secretaries who wittered blondely away at each other across tepid gin and tonics. They received pats on their unisex bottoms from time to time; otherwise they were left to themselves to make their marriage plans. Occasionally the fervent face of a producer, male or female, would pop through the barroom door as though on a spring; those were the people from Independent Television round the corner in Wells Street. Also a newscaster might drift remotely across the scene, too drenched in disasters to be seen talking to just anybody. If such people did stay, however, they ordered democratic halves of lager and talked shop, using well-rehearsed gestures and smiles, aping ‘The Upper Classes’, a new series that was being run on television by the company in which Lord Boughtham, the Foreign Secretary, held a controlling interest.
My side of the pub was the cheap side, where the fruit machines, jukeboxes and villains were. It was crammed just now with Planet drivers from over the road swilling down Guinness and eating sausage, mash and peas at the lunch counter. A youth who I happened to know had done eight for murder stood on his own under the window next to a space-game, not drinking, not doing anything. His face was white; he wore his hair cropped and was dressed completely in black. Even his sneakers he had polished black. Not only was he a murderer, but he looked like one, which as a policeman I thought was pretty stupid of him. On the middle finger of his right hand he wore a big silver ring shaped like a skull with two paste rubies for eyes, just in case people still hadn’t got the message; all the other fingers on the hand, and the thumb, inclined towards it. His eyes slid over me, over all the drinkers; they didn’t rest on anyone, just looked briefly through them. I could visualize his expres-sion not changing whether he was ordering a beer or pulling a trigger; the two halves of his personality were not, and never had been, on speaking terms. I also noted two well-known tealeaves—thieves, you know—who were coming up for sentence at Knightsbridge Crown Court. They were chatting to the elderly homosexual from the working-class flats in Gosfield Street who bred Doberman pinschers. The shorter of the tealeaves had been badly cut in the face and was declaiming drunkenly through his tears. The cuts were fresh and had stitches in them; they suggested a broken bottle. He had most likely squealed on someone, and vengeance had just had time to catch up with him before they tucked him away in jail.
Barbara came in suddenly. What she was wearing wouldn’t have recommended itself to the change-jingling television mob, let alone their secretaries. All the same there was a thoughtful pause when she entered; even the murderer looked slowly round at her. Her orange dress was wrong for this side of the river, and her high-heeled slippers would have looked wrong anywhere except in the 84 Club. She had tried hard, and it showed. But nobody seemed much bothered about that; she looked pretty astounding.
‘You’re late,’ I said.
‘Okay, okay, but don’t let’s start the right day off wrong.’
‘What’ll you have?’
‘Aren’t you going to give me a kiss?’
‘Not in here.’
‘All right. I’ll have a sweet martini.’
‘You’re mad to drink those. Women haven’t got the liver for them.’
‘Listen, are you giving me orders?’
‘Yes, if you’re my girl.’
‘I’m not anybody’s girl.’
‘Okay, well in that case I won’t get you anything. What’s the point?’
She went white with rage. ‘You’ve got a fucking nerve,’ she hissed. She burst out of the place, with all the producers and textile folk gazing after her. One of the producers said to me: ‘I say, old boy, you shouldn’t upset a stunner like that.’
‘Try bowling more lobs,’ I said, ‘and button it.’
I drank my beer, waiting to see if she would come back. I knew she would; she was just acting. Behind her act was her body, which only reacted to violence and subjugation; it would always let her down.
She came back after ten minutes, anger simmering under her renewed makeup. ‘Why did you treat me like that,’ she said, ‘you bastard?’
‘It’s the only way with you,’ I said, ‘from a man’s point of view. If I gave you that much leeway you’d crush me, and I’m not wearing it.’
‘Tell me some more.’
‘Later, at lunch. Now then, round two—what’ll you have?’ She burst out laughing: ‘You amaze me—well, I won’t have a sweet martini, anyway!’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘then let’s split a bottle of champagne. I feel like celebrating, and you can’t celebrate on beer. You know anything about champagne?’
‘It’s just champagne.’
‘No, it isn’t. I read that in the
Sunday Times, but that’s all I can remember.’
‘You’ve really got no idea about champagne?’
‘How can you expect me to know much about something I’ve only drunk twice? Anyway,’ I added, ‘you’ve no idea about men.’
‘Why should I have? I’m a woman.’
I couldn’t think of an answer to that, so I said to the girl behind the bar: ‘A bottle of champagne. A good one.’
‘You mean the Clicko?’ she said, bemused. ‘Expensive, that is, cost you eight pound twenty.’
‘That’s the stuff, then.’
The arrival of the champagne caused a strange, almost innocent note to creep between us—it was as if, for an instant, we really were a shy bridal couple toasting each other. She kissed me over our glasses; I shook myself savagely inside. I kissed her back, but it was a very chaste kiss; I had a nightmarish feeling that any plainclothesman over from the Factory watching people from a corner might all too easily recognize me.
‘You don’t come on quite as hot in the daytime as you do at night,’ Barbara said, ‘if you’ll excuse my saying so.’
‘I do better without an audience.’
‘Funny, with most men it’s the other way round.’ She drank some champagne and said: ‘You’re not ashamed to be seen with me or anything? Who do you think you are?’
‘A lover,’ I said, ‘and I’ve never been ashamed of anything in my life. I had a very happy childhood.’
‘Why’ve you never got married, then?’
‘I was once,’ I reminded her. ‘But there’s no point in going out of your way to be disappointed.’
25
We ate at the Light of India, in the Fulham Road; it was the best Indian food I knew of in the area, even if it wasn’t cheap.
He Died with His Eyes Open (Factory 1) Page 14