by John Harvey
I guess the building which housed my office they left because it looked as if it was going to fall down of its own accord. But it hadn’t yet. Though there were days when I wished it would; as if sending the bricks and mortar and glass of that office smashing to the ground would somehow release me from the web I had wrapped myself up in. Whereas all it would do would be to take me with it.
Today I had a drink and even then things didn’t look any better. I climbed up the stairs to the first floor and looked gloomily at the chipped paint of my name on the door. I gave an involuntary jump as the phone bell started to ring from inside the office. I took out my key and put it into the lock. I didn’t turn it. The phone still rang. I removed the key and put it back in my pocket.
When I got downstairs to the front door the bell was still ringing.
By the time I got to Sandy I had swallowed several more scotches and was feeling none the better for it. But at least things had stopped ringing in my ears.
She came to the door of her flat and let me in. She didn’t look surprised and she didn’t look particularly pleased either. Just stepped back out of the way to let me in. I put the half-bottle of whisky I had just bought down on the table beside the bed. Sandy went back over to the dressing table and continued to put on her make-up. I went into the small kitchen, brought back two glasses, poured two generous shots, put one on the dressing table top and took the other over to the bed. I lay across it and looked at her.
Ten years ago she had been a slight figure ducking back into doorways, avoiding my approaches as I patrolled the streets. One evening she had been thrown out by her pimp; she had not been bringing in enough money. Not just thrown out, though. He had beaten her up, leaving bruises as deep as they were colourful all over her body—and a three-inch cut alongside her right ear which he had made with his razor.
I had found her, crawling on her hands and knees along the gutter, her face a mask of blood, grime and tears. Still she had had the strength to spit into my face.
I took her back to someone I knew would look after her and went looking for her pimp. At three in the morning I found him in a West Indian drinking club in Paddington. There were too many of his friends there so I waited until gone five, when he came out with two of them. They had walked around the corner towards their car, laughing into the morning air. It was just starting to get light and they saw me moving towards them but even so it was some while before they realised who I was. One of them turned and ran. I let him go.
The one I wanted stopped and reached inside his overcoat pocket for what I guessed was his razor. His companion raced for the car. He reached the door a fraction of a second before me: enough time to get the key in the lock. I flung him back across the pavement and into the wire fencing that ran alongside a used-car lot. As he bounced back off it I caught him in the middle of the back with my boot and he cannoned into it again.
He began to slump down to the floor and I turned to face the razor which streaked before my eyes. I shot up an arm and knocked it high and lunged in beneath it. My right fist hit something hard, drew back and hit again. This time it punched against something softer, like an eye. He shouted and swore and the hand holding the razor tried for my face once more. It found the edge of my ear but nothing more. I grabbed upwards with both hands and took hold of his arm on either side of the elbow. Then I brought down the back of the arm, held taut, against the upraised top of my thigh. There was a splintering sound that echoed across the early morning and was followed by a scream of pain.
Behind me I heard his friend trying to get to the car again. Some friend! He was more successful this time and got half of his body inside the front before I grabbed him and pulled. In his fear he clung fast to the steering wheel, while I wrenched his neck backwards. Still he clung. I swung the car door hard. It caught him across the top of his shoulder blade and he let go and dropped to the floor. He fell with his head between the sill and the bottom of the front seat. I swung the door again.
Razor Boy was still holding his right arm and whimpering. I wrenched him round and threw him back against the wire fence. As he flopped back at me I hit him hard under the jaw with the heel of my hand, caught him, turned him and slammed his face against the fence. I held him there while I went through his pockets. There was still over sixty pounds in his wallet. I pushed it down into my jacket and rammed his face hard into the wire with my other hand.
‘Right! Now listen and listen good because I’m only going to say this once! If I see you round on my patch any more I’m going to take you in and ram every charge in the book right up your black arse! And that’s before I get you alone in the station house with no witnesses and a nice piece of rubber hose. And you can tell the same to any of your friends who have an inkling to carve young girls up just for the fun of it. Understood?’
I jammed his face further into the fence and held it there; when I released him and turned him round the black of his skin was bisected by white lines.
I thought he understood. I hit him again to make sure and walked away.
Now, sitting on the bed drinking another whisky while Sandy finished her eyelashes, I realised that it wasn’t really that easy. For one thing I wasn’t so young and I probably couldn’t do it. For another it didn’t work. Any more than the drink did. Any more—I thought, looking at the swell of Sandy’s breasts as she raised her arm level with her face—than sex. At least, it only worked for a while.
She sipped at her drink and then ran her tongue along her lower lip. After that occasion when I had found her beaten up she had gone off the streets and gone back home; for a time. But like most girls who start and try to give it all up, she had come back. Older and wiser and less easy to boss around. She got work as hostess in one of the so-called drinking clubs where you got punters to drink coloured water and pay you large sums in return for a promise that you would meet them later round the corner and take them home for a nice time. Then Sandy had discovered that she could earn more as a stripper.
So she spent her days rushing from one tiny cellar to another, with her costume in a tiny leather case. At first she even used to remember which name she was dancing under and where. But then she had realised that it didn’t matter. No one was buying her name: they were buying her body—across the haze of the floodlights and through the poorly recorded music. Which was as near to true contact as most of them wanted or dared.
Somewhere along the way we had slept together. After I had stopped being a legitimate cop and she no longer resented me expecting it as fair trade. And when she had lost any thought of charging me as just another customer.
It had been nothing to do with love, nothing to do with any ideas of romance: it was all to do with the needs of the body. And it had worked. We knew we did not have to be suspicious of each other; neither of us wanted more than the other. What we both wanted was pleasure—and relaxation afterwards without feeling soiled by guilt or money.
It had continued to work.
Sandy stood up. She was tall: five eight or nine. She had on a red and black patterned blouse in some see-through kind of silk, a short black skirt that stopped a couple of inches above black boots which came over her knees; her light reddish hair curled down to her breasts at the front and it hung down from below a wide-brimmed black hat which had a band of blue and white beads at the crown. More beads—blue, yellow and white—hung from her neck down her blouse.
I reached up a hand towards her. She smiled and took it in her own.
‘Scott Mitchell! You just sat there and watched me taking great care about putting on my make-up. If you think I’m going to get it all messed up just because you decide to feel randy in the middle of the day then you’ve got another think coming.’
I reached up my other hand and pulled her down. ‘That’s not what I’ve got coming—not exactly.’
She kissed me gently at the base of the neck. ‘Don’t you ever think of anything else?’
I sat up and seriously considered the matter.
‘Well, there was a half-hour last Thursday week, when I distinctly recall thinking about steak.’
She pulled the hat off her head and hit me with it. I aimed my mouth for the riot of red hair she had set free and held her fast. We rolled back across the bed and when I raised myself above her the buttons at the front of her blouse had worked themselves undone. I knew her breasts were beautiful but still I never tired of the first sight of them; swelling from lace that looked sizes too small or free and naked. I lowered my head, and ran my tongue between them, pushing the edges of the material away until I could tease her nipples. Tease and bite.
Sandy jumped and gave a small shriek. Then she reached her fingers down towards the swelling inside my trousers. As she began to pull at the top of my zip I looked into her eyes and thought of Vonnie’s face that morning. Alternately smiling and pleading. Then I thought of Candi’s face last night. Empty. Dead.
Sandy’s eyes were green and alive and they didn’t want anything more dangerous or confusing than this. I closed my own eyes and kissed her. Hard.
5
Like I said, it didn’t work for long but at the moment I felt good. I could even take the fact that old bum-freezer was waiting for me round the corner, standing inside a call box holding a non-existent conversation. They were probably the kind he did best.
I could even take the fact that I should have reported in to West End Central and hadn’t, which meant that by now the law would be getting a little anxious and starting to shift uneasily on its fat arse. I could take the fact that I found some drugs in Candi’s flat and that someone beat the hell out of me to get them back. I could take the look of fear behind the puffed-up slits of Maxie’s eyes when I mentioned his visit from Godzilla. Just at that moment I could take a heck of a lot. Some big feller!
The office building still hadn’t quite fallen down when I got back to it and the paint was still flaking away. At least the phone had stopped ringing.
When I got into the room the blinds were pulled down and they were waiting. They looked like hoods everywhere. They had the same anonymous clothes, the same anonymous faces, the same anonymous minds. They were all spawned from the same gutter and they never lifted as much as a little toe out of it until the day they lay back down in it again and stopped moving. All they knew about was taking orders and taking what they could get. All they gave in return was a kind of dumb loyalty and a blind, stupid obedience. If they were told to work somebody over good they would do it, no matter what.
And here was I thinking I was ripe to conquer the world: I said the feeling didn’t last long.
Then one of them surprised me. He spoke. They were really high class!
‘We’ve got a word for you, Mitchell.’
‘I bet it’s the same one I’ve got for you.’ I was still feeling pretty snappy, but the slight jolt in his glazed expression told me that was something I might live to regret. If I was lucky.
‘You listen! The word is—take a holiday.’
I was going to inform him that was three words but what was the use of asking for trouble when it had already arrived—packaged by arrangement with crombie.
‘Is that all? Maybe I’d like to know who’s sending me get well messages before I’m ill.’
He moved around the desk. His friend, the strong silent type, stayed where he was—between me and the door. If they hadn’t already taken it there was a gun in my desk drawer. Maybe if I waved that at them they would go away and play somewhere else. Though I doubted it; they would only come back later and wave some heat at me.
‘Okay, Mitchell, remember what we said. Leave town. Do yourself a big favour. Blow.’
They talked in clichés; they looked like clichés; they hit like clichés. The same old punches to the same old, bruised places. The talkative one swung a fist at my head while his partner aimed another low into my kidneys. I rode the first with a duck of the head and turned towards the second. The fist was bunched like a pound of bananas but it wouldn’t do me as much good. I caught at it with both hands and held fast; then I swung up my knee. It hit him full in the groin and he gasped and tried to pull away. I held on and was about to give him the treatment a second time when something like a ton weight descended on me from what seemed to be a great height.
One of them picked me up and sat me in my office chair; the other kicked the chair out from under me. The chair splintered against the wall and I fell to the worn carpet with a thump and a fast loss of breath. The boot struck me in the left shoulder at the right height to numb my arm. To make sure the feeling had gone, they hauled me up by it and threw me down on top of the chair.
This was getting a little too repetitive for comfort. When the kick came in again I grabbed underneath it and hoisted it on its way towards the ceiling. At the same moment I was off the floor and diving into the gut of the hood beside the desk. He caught at my head as it buried itself into the cloth of his overcoat, but couldn’t stop the impact. We bounced across the room and I got up fast, trampling on him as many times as I could in the process. I needed to get back to my desk first: I damn near made it.
Maybe next time. Maybe if I can get in a little more practice. Maybe.
The one with chorus-boy ambitions was waiting and he had a nasty-looking piece of piping raised above his shoulder. The nearer it got to my head the nastier it looked. Then I stopped seeing it altogether.
There’s this movie called ‘The Big Sleep’. I thought about it now; thought about a little guy in the movie called Jones. Jones is little and weedy and looks like a born victim. He gets himself hired to tail the hero around but he isn’t very good at it. He gets himself spotted but he sticks to it all the same. Perhaps he needed the money, perhaps it was his pride. Who knows? He stuck to it when he should have gone home to his wife and kids and read a good book—any kind of a book.
Jones got too close at the wrong time. He ended up getting too close to death. He ended up drinking from the wrong cup and getting himself poisoned and then he slept all right. For good.
He was a mug playing a mug’s game but I felt sorry for him: like a child trying hard to be a man and not knowing it wasn’t worth it.
Bum-freezer hadn’t got himself poisoned but he had got himself killed. I found him half-way down the stairs leading out on to the street. He had either been on his way up or on his way out: either way it made no difference. He wasn’t going anywhere now. Arms and legs were crumpled at all directions from the break in the stairway. His head couldn’t be seen at first, but when I knelt down beside him I saw it tucked down into his body and towards the wall as though it did not want to be hit any more. It was bloody and pulped on one side as though whoever had hit him was in a bad mood and wanted to take it out on something. He just happened to choose bum-freezer’s head.
I looked carefully and delicately in his pockets for anything that might be useful. The only thing I found was a card: it read—
James Cook
Car Hire
01.485.7684
I put it in my top pocket and let the corner of his leather jacket fall back into place. In my head I drank a toast to success.
Then I went back to my office to call the police. They beat me to it by three strides. It was Tom Gilmour and he was annoyed. He was even more annoyed when I told him about the body that was cluttering up the stairs in a fine neighbourhood like mine. He even told me that if I touched the body before he got there he would haul my arse into the cells quicker than forked lightning. They should never have sent him on a year’s exchange to New York: it’s done nothing for his language. Nothing at all.
There was nothing else on Cook to identify him; I guessed that the solitary card had been a mistake. Just one more in a lifetime of mistakes. A short lifetime and probably not a happy one. I wanted to keep that information to myself for a while. If I could find out who ha
d hired him to follow me it might help. Whoever it had been it wasn’t the same person who had me warned off, that was sure. He dealt in professionals.
I told Gilmour I had seen him earlier that day and that maybe he was a tail. I told him about my visitors. Not that I could have kept that a secret. The top of my head looked like a launching pad at Cape Canaveral.
‘What do you think they wanted? I’m behind with the gas bill. It’s a new way of collecting debts: they get these riggers fresh from working in the North Sea and set them to work on dry land. It’s more effective than sending reminders printed in red.’
‘Listen, stupid! Don’t fill my ears full of that wise-cracking shit! Already I could book you for failing to report first thing this morning. You just happen to be a prime suspect on a murder charge or maybe you’d forgotten that sweet fact? Now you’ve got dead bodies crawling out of the woodwork as though they’re going out of style and a lump on your head the size of one of Raquel Welch’s tits. You’re in no position to make jokes; even if they were funny.’
‘Tom, go easy will you? I’ve had enough pounded out of me for one day without you as well. I thought British cops were always calm and thoughtful and gave out with cups of tea and cigarettes. That time in Manhattan South really stirred you up.’
He sat back in the one remaining intact chair in the office and looked up at me, perched precariously on the edge of the desk. Down on the stairway men were dusting the walls and bannisters for prints and drawing chalk marks around what had been James Cook of James Cook Car Hire. Limited. Very.
Since he had got back from the States, Tom even dressed differently. His suits were somehow fresher, sharper; he walked with a certain bounce which hadn’t been there before; he flung words around with disregard for whom they hit and how. He had added to the basic training and experience that had made him a good cop a toughness which threatened to make him a great one. And here was I withholding information and trying to beat him to the punch.