by John Harvey
‘Legal?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘The way you do your work is your affair, Mitchell. As long as nothing rebounds on to me. I simply want to find out who’s living in the flat and what rights they have to be there. Nothing more.’
I tried to decide whether or not I believed him. There was no reason for not doing so. No reason, just a hunch. And something about that unlit cigar held between the fingers of his left hand.
We started to talk about unimportant little things like money.
Five minutes later he was gone, leaving me with a cash advance and a telephone number at which I should contact him as soon as I found out anything definite or after five days, whichever came first.
Sitting in that cold room, it seemed that the five days were going to win by a walkover. Apart from the guy in the salt and pepper coat, the flat was as busy as a suburban station at three in the morning. Of course, there was a back way in—if you didn’t mind cutting across a garage forecourt, ducking along a low alley and jostling with a few empty dustbins.
But people living in a place that was rightfully theirs wouldn’t stoop to any such thing. I mean, why should they? They weren’t criminals or anything; they weren’t even squatters; they were simply ordinary folk living an ordinary life and not wanting to be pushed around by some property speculator or other.
Well, good for them! If I had a drink, I’d have lifted it high and toasted them.
But I didn’t have a drink. All I had was a notebook that was mainly full of blank pages, cold feet, and an aching back caused by sitting too long in the same position.
I didn’t need to look at my watch to know that it was time I took a walk.
I didn’t think there’d be much point in trying the front entrance, but I did anyway. I was right. There wasn’t. Okay, I said to myself, if they want to play it coy …
It was dark in the alley and I kicked one of the bins and sent out a little clattering echo towards the rear door. I waited for a couple of minutes to make sure there was no reaction, then followed it. Of course, the door was locked and, of course, I was able to get it open without a sound. I hadn’t been a professional all these years for nothing.
I shut the door behind me. I seemed to be in some kind of passageway which led into a larder. There was a light showing at the far end. I walked towards it. Carefully.
The light was in the kitchen and it swung shadeless above a wooden table that was littered with mugs and plates which looked as though they had been simply used and left.
Perhaps the home help was sick.
The kettle was on a ledge in the corner of the room and the lead was plugged in. I touched its side gently; it was still hot.
Well, I thought, I could always call out and ask if there was anybody home. Then again, I could take a quiet look around and find out for myself.
There were two doors off to the right of the kitchen: bathroom and toilet. Both empty. There was a large square hall with coloured tiles across its floor. Enough to roof a normal-size house. In fact, any ten people could have camped out in that hallway without ever feeling cramped.
The door to the left of the hall was slightly ajar. There were two other doors leading off; they were both shut tight. On one of the walls was a large poster for an exhibition of work by Mark Boyle. Below it, a red bicycle rested against the paintwork. It was a lady’s model and looked as though it had had a lot of use. No one was using it at the moment. The rear tyre was flat with the air of a tyre that has been flat for a very long time. I thought I knew how it felt.
I went through the door that wasn’t closed. The guy with the curly hair was sitting cross-legged on the floor at the far end of the room. He was sitting on a large purple cushion with a mug on the carpet in front of him. He wasn’t wearing his overcoat, but I recognised him anyway.
He looked up at me with a startled expression. His mouth opened as if he was going to say something, but he must have changed his mind. The mouth stayed open so that he looked like one of the fish in the tank under the window. I started to go over towards him.
A second before what ever hit me hit me I sensed it was coming. You always can. It might be the sudden proximity of another person, the sound or the warmth of their breath, the smell of their sweat, the swish of a solid object being swung through the air. It might be some sixth sense, some conditioned reflex brought on by being hit from behind more times than can be healthy for one man.
Not that I thought about the possibilities at the time. I didn’t think about anything for very long. I tried to swing round, knowing all the while that I would never make it. I didn’t.
I had this final glimpse of the curly haired guy’s mouth open even wider, his eyes staring past my shoulder; then someone drove a small but efficient train into the back of my head and I lost interest in anything else in the world.
I wasn’t even aware of falling to the floor.
But I had. I woke up on it some time later. There was a pain in my arm and another in my right ankle. The arm hurt because I had been lying awkwardly on it; I couldn’t work out what was wrong with my ankle. I could have twisted it on the way down, or whoever slugged me might have been feeling vindictive.
It didn’t look as though he’d stayed around to discuss it with me. Nor had my fast-walking, coffee-drinking friend. It was just me and fishes. The least I could do was go and exchange a friendly word or two. I pushed myself up off the ground and was suddenly conscious of what felt like a hole in the back of my skull.
I put my fingers round there gingerly and was relieved to find that they didn’t sink in several inches. Rather, it was the opposite. There was a bump there that would have made a maternal duck want to sit on it and hatch it out. That and some dried blood which had stuck to my hair.
The fish didn’t regard me very sympathetically. They didn’t regard me at all. Simply went on with their own fishy business. I reached down and shook a little food out of the cardboard container alongside the tank. It floated on the water and they ignored that too. There was something about the way they refused to get involved which struck me as admirable. For fish.
I checked my wallet. There had been seven five pound notes; they had been going to see me through some time ahead; they were missing.
I didn’t like it. I didn’t like losing the money and especially I didn’t like being slugged and rolled like some sucker. If it got around it could be bad for business. Supposing that I had a business it could be bad for.
I shook my head to clear it but only succeeded in making things worse. I rubbed my eyes with my fingers and when they were open again I noticed the photograph.
It was standing on top of a chest of drawers behind the door, propped against the wall. A large black and white picture of a girl. I stood a while and stared at her; there was something about the way she stared back that I liked. The eyes said, I’m me and I don’t care who knows it; I’m me and you can either love me or hate me, take me or leave me.
I thought I knew which I would do if I got the chance. I wondered how many others already had. I went and looked at the photo more closely.
The girl was lying along a bed, propped up on one arm. Her head was towards the camera. She was wearing a black leather jacket, which was marked enough to suggest that it wasn’t her own, a short skirt and a pair of black leather boots. Her face was pale yet open; her eyes were dark; her hair was a medium browny shade and cut so that it followed the shape of her head.
She looked as though she could be very young. Like the song says, not a minute over seventeen.
Very young and very sexy.
I didn’t want to leave her there with the fish, but there wasn’t any point in making love to a photograph. Even I knew that. I’d tried it once or twice before.
Besides it was time I looked in the other rooms. This time I’d make sure I peeped behind the doors first.
Not that t
hat was necessary. The first room I went into was empty, even of furniture. Just a few books propped against the wall on the far edge of the carpet. The second room had a lot more in it.
There was a table which might have been oak, a circular job with one of those massive central legs that splay out in all directions. There were four chairs set around it and an empty fruit bowl at its centre. In front of a white-surrounded fireplace there were two deep, old-fashioned armchairs covered in a floral print. High on a shelf on the far wall, incongruously, was a large television. The wall to my right was taken up with bookshelves and books. The books were nearly all leather bound and some of them were nearly as fat as they were high. They looked very dusty. Directly opposite the doorway there was one of those settees with one curved end against which ladies used to drape themselves decorously.
Only this lady was looking anything but decorous. Her dress had managed to get itself hitched up to the top of her thighs and her tights were exposed to the v where they joined. You could see the dark bush of hair underneath; she didn’t seem to be wearing any pants. There was a wide ladder running down the inside of her right leg.
From where I was standing I could only see the left side of her face and what I could see I didn’t like at all. Not that she wasn’t pretty. She could have been; you couldn’t tell. Not any more.
Somebody had given her a working over which made the tap on the back of my own head seem like a love bite from a passing gnat.
The flesh on that side was swollen out to twice its normal size and was a strange mixture of purple and dark brown. At the centre of this uneven ball of bruising, the skin had peeled back as though a bird had bitten down into it, mistaking it for an overripe fruit.
Above this, there was another swelling around the left eye, which was almost completely enclosed. From close-up I could see that the eye itself was still open. Half of it appeared to be covered by a bright red membrane. The other half stared up at me vacantly.
I looked at what I could of the far side of the face. It was untouched, beautiful even. I had thought she would be the girl in the photograph but she wasn’t. I was pleased, without knowing exactly why.
Except that I didn’t want her to be dead. Dead like the girl who was stretched out beneath me. I wanted to pull the dress back down but I didn’t. I wanted to find out what had killed her, but I didn’t do anything about that either; apart from make one or two guesses.
I could do without being mixed up in a murder. At least, on what I was getting for this job. Murder came higher.
I went out of the room and shut the door behind me. The telephone in the kitchen didn’t work; it had been thoughtfully disconnected. I checked my pockets for change. One call would need to be paid for, the other wouldn’t.
I left the house the way I had gone in; making it seem that the door had never been locked. Then I found the nearest phone box. For a change it wasn’t vandalised. After a short discussion with myself as to which call to make first, I lifted the receiver and got through to the police. They told me to wait where I was. I assured them that I would.
While I was waiting I tried the second number. The one Blagden had given me. I thought a dead body and a sapping counted as something to report.
Only I didn’t like the tone the telephone was adopting. It made me feel sick low in my stomach. The operator was polite but definite: number unobtainable.
If I’d made that call first, maybe I would never have phoned the cops at all. But I had and now all I could sensibly do was wait. The fact that the proof of my reason for being in the flat, in the first place seemed to have disappeared wasn’t anything to worry about. Was it?
2
They soon arrived and began a whole lot of measuring and dusting, taking of photographs and drawing of white lines. After a few curt questions they allowed me to stand in the corner and watch. I was the naughty boy who’d flicked an ink pellet at the teacher and been found out. In case I decided to make a break for the playground or run home and fetch my big brother, these two guys stood on either side of me looking at me as though I was someone’s regurgitated lunch.
The clicking and scribbling had been going on for ten minutes or so when the guy in charge finally showed up. He had the air of a man who has just been dragged out of bed at the wrong time and for the wrong reason.
It wasn’t that late and I wondered whose bed he had pulled from. It didn’t need another look to tell me that I wasn’t going to ask him.
He was around fifty and wore the expression of a cop who didn’t particularly like what he did and so did it all the harder. I guessed that was what had made him chief inspector: but no more. His face was turning to flab low on the cheeks and around the chin; wherever he’d been that evening, he’d been careful to shave before he went. Hoods of skin tended to mask his eyes, so that the pupils looked duller than perhaps they were.
His blue overcoat made him appear bulky, even allowing for his being over six foot. I didn’t think I would like to cross him, but it was already too late for thoughts like that.
He only turned his head in my direction once, when this other plainclothes man gave him a quick run-down on who I was. I couldn’t tell what he thought. Not then. Later I would and it wouldn’t be across a crowded room.
There was an air of suppressed excitement in the police station: maybe they didn’t get too many murders. In their part of London it was mostly bomb scares at the air terminal and the odd Australian who forgot to put a match to the gas fire as he sat in his bedsit dreaming of Bondi Beach.
The uniformed man who took me down to the interview room even smiled. He must have known what I was in for.
There was another one standing in the ritual position, against the wall directly behind my chair, so that I would know he was there without being able to see him. I sat a while and waited. The chair opposite me was vacant. Possibly he was busy; possibly he wanted to make me jumpy. I leaned my elbows on the table and let a few things run through my brain.
The startled expression on the face of the curly-haired guy who had been sitting on the floor; the empty eye of the girl on the settee; the girl in the leather jacket, her face open to the world. I was wondering what the world had done to it when he came in and pushed the chair back from the table with a dull grating sound.
He stared down at me for long enough to have imprinted my face on his mind for a long, long time. Then he sat down. He took out a packet of cigarettes and lit up; he didn’t offer me one.
The smoke hung lazily in the still room.
Cut off from all of the activity and expectation outside, that room was like a place out of time. A lot of things could happen there. A lot of things already had.
I sensed the man behind me shifting his weight from one foot to another.
‘You’re Mitchell.’
It wasn’t a question, so I just sat there. A mistake. His right hand was flung out across the table and slapped me hard along my right cheek. He was wearing a heavy ring and I could feel that it had cut the skin on the edge of my cheekbone.
‘Don’t play dumb and don’t play smart. If I ask something I want an answer. Understand?’
I must have been a bit slow in nodding. He caught me this time with the open flat of the hand. The sound rose up towards the ceiling then fell back, killed by the deadness of the room.
He fished in his pocket and brought out the wallet I had handed into the sergeant at the desk. From it he took my card and my licence. He placed them on the table between us and looked at them with a sneer. The same sneer he had on his face when he asked me if I’d been working long.
I told him how long.
He asked me how much longer I expected to go on working.
I shrugged my shoulders and said that I didn’t know.
His eyes suggested that he did.
‘What were you doing in the flat, Mitchell?’
He asked the
question as though he wasn’t prepared to believe a word I said and I told him the same way. I could have been reciting ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears.’ Only this Goldilocks hadn’t been asleep, she’d been dead and there hadn’t been any sign of the porridge. What was more, the other two bears had split fast and left Papa Bear with the body.
It didn’t look good. It didn’t sound good. The guy behind me didn’t like it either. He changed feet again. Nothing about the face in front of me changed.
‘I know it doesn’t sound much,’ I said, ‘but the truth seldom does.’
His sneer returned. ‘Skip the philosophy, Mitchell. Besides, you’ve been grafting in the gutter so long that you wouldn’t recognise a piece of truth if it spat in your eye.’
‘If it wasn’t true, then why would I have called you in the first place? Why would I have hung around for your men to arrive?’
‘You called us originally because you panicked. You stuck around because you realised that you were so deep in the shit you couldn’t get out without falling head first in it and suffocating. You’re a cheap hoodlum who thinks that a couple of words like private investigator after your name give you the right to take the law into your own hands. You broke into the flat illegally and found the girl there. You tried to get something out of her. It might have been information and it might have been sex. Who knows? It doesn’t much matter. What does matter is that she wasn’t giving you what you wanted so you beat up on her and you beat up too hard. Then you thought up this cock and bull story and tried to save your hide by trying it out on us.’
He looked across the table at me like he was looking at a piece of rotten meat someone had brought in from the abattoir we call the world.
I thought it was time to level with him. ‘You’re talking crap! I’m not the one who’s up to the ears in shit, that’s you! Up to the ears and beyond. You’ve been doing your job in your own stupid way so long that the shit’s oozing out of your ears and eyes and pouring from your mouth each time you open it to speak! If you checked up on the couple of names I gave you, then you’ll know that whatever else I might do, there’s no way I’m going to throw a panic. I’m a professional, too. As much as you are. The only difference is that there are times when my eyes actually open and I can see things through them. What’s more, I’m not into slapping people around the head. That seems to be more in your line. Come to think of it, where were you earlier this evening, chief inspector?