The Devil's Home on Leave (Factory 2)

by Raymond, Derek

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t go up there again anyhow,’ the caretaker called back angrily, ‘not for a million quid, mate.’ No, I thought, but you’d hang about by the door to see if there was anything tasty, and hope you’d maybe get your boat in the linens.

  ‘Shut the street door after you,’ I shouted down to him, ‘and shut it tight.’ When I heard him do that I turned to the reporter on the stairs and said: ‘You sure you want to do this? It isn’t going to be easy.’

  He said yes. I looked him over for a moment. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s get on with it then.’ We walked up to the second floor and pushed the heavy door open. The water and electricity in the building were off, but there was the daylight to see by. There were the bags all right, standing neatly against the far wall. I smelled dust and plank flooring, also a trace of something else – cooking? corruption? – in that immense space. Far off the city traffic growled, and a tug moaned on the river; I opened the blank doorway that side, above the rusted hoist, and looked down into the Thames which surged along twenty feet from the place. Then I crossed to the bags and looked down at the cheerful logo on them. That was where the smell came from all right. That was less cheerful. The only difference from the original find was that the forensic people hadn’t restapled the bags. One gaped open, and I could see the cooked, grey flesh inside.

  I found I was thinking as the killer. I thought: I’m mad. Yes, but we’ve all got to try and look normal. That made him a professional for me – because of that psychopath’s carapace that stood for reason. I found I had already decided, assumed anyway, that he must have had help. OK, with or without help, I’ve killed a man, bled him, cooked him and stapled him up in five shopping bags. The staples were a weird touch; someone must actually have had a stapler on him – it was that well planned. Also the weapon, of course. Now, we don’t know what that is yet, not till I get something from the lab. Never mind. Look normal, but not be normal, that’s me. Kill in cold blood, but then be sure that there is no blood. I looked round the whole floor space looking for a mark, looking for anything, though I knew it was pointless; if there’d been anything found, the forensic people would have told us. All right. So the body must have been held over something like a tub – maybe even one of the pans they afterwards cooked him in, a tub standing on a plastic sheet no doubt, and drained. One of the individuals held and positioned him while the other slit his throat. OK, then they boiled the blood away in the pans with the rest of it. Yes, Bowman was surely right there. Where did they get the water to cook him in? No water on in the building, heavy and difficult to bring enough of it with you, five, ten gallons. Don’t be silly; it’s dark, it must have been, and there’s the river twenty feet away. That’s where they got the water. Right, once there’s not a drop of anything left in him, now you can start. Disembowel him – all that, the lights and the rest of the shit, into one pan. Cook it clean – no need to leave a smell straight off. Any mess, it’s all on the plastic sheet. Then the butchery. Joint him – a good knife and a sharpener, also a hammer to smash the bones so it’ll all go into the pans. Sharpen the knife and cut the spine through at the vertebrae in two or three places. Take the head off, the feet and the hands. Especially the head and the hands. Knock the teeth out, too; there’s your hammer, whip through the jaw with your knife and knock them out. Then stand around while it all cooks – what a tea party! Heat to cook him on? Easy! Why not good old camping gas? Little cooker, flat, something you could just stick in the motor, and two or three bottles of gas – what could be more innocent than that? A picnic! A midnight picnic! Of course, with no stains or marks anywhere around, it could have been done somewhere else, but I’ll bet it wasn’t, this is the ideal spot. The whole area’s run down, shut up, deserted, abandoned, nothing but those high-rise blocks two hundred yards away on the land side. The caretaker never goes round at night, I’ll bet; he’s too frightened and he’s a boozer. Smell? Smell of cooking meat? OK, some lorry-driver’s back home late and got his old woman to fix him a big tasty meal, what’s peculiar about that? Nothing. Lights on in this place? No, no lights. All done by torchlight. Very neat, very professional, so far – only there must have been two of them. One to pick the victim up and bring him here, the other to set the cooker and the rest of the gear up. Less risk that way because it would have looked funny if the law had stopped the car with the killer and the victim in it for a bald tyre or a u/s exhaust and noted, one, that the victim didn’t look happy and then, two, opened the boot and found it crammed with plastic sheeting, saucepans, cooker and gas bottles, a hammer, a butcher’s knife and a sharpener. But if you split it so that the killer with the victim has the unobtrusive stuff in his car – the knife, the weapon – and the other bloke has the rest of it in his car, that doubles your chances. All right, then, well, it’s a set of assumptions, but you’ve got to start somewhere. OK, then? OK, now. What about afterwards? He’s cooked. He’s into his five bags and stapled up. Well, afterwards, you’ve only got three problems. You’ve got the dead man’s clothing and belongings, you’ve got the plastic sheet looking like a butcher’s apron, and the used water in the pans. Also, the pans themselves have got to go – those, the cooker and the gas-bottle. Well, OK, for my money it all went in the river with solid weights on it. Rivers wash clean and wash fast. They aren’t kind to clothes either – clothes soon look old in a river. And who’s going to look twice at a washed-up piece of plastic sheet anyway? Or at the remains of clothing, articles turning up at different places if they turn up at all? If there were identifying marks on any of it, you can bet they were removed before they went into the drink. Find the gear? Us? Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack! You should see what turns up when the tide runs out – anything from a Victorian halfpenny to a French letter. And the river so handy! That’s why they picked the place, I tell you everything went straight down into the mud. No future in looking for it. No point getting the frogmen out. Better tackle it from a different angle.

  OK, what angle? Well, I’m still putting myself in the killer’s place, trying to imagine him, trying to get a picture. Talk about cool! Standing around with the other bloke (I’m supposing) waiting for the meat to be cooked. I’m taking my time. All my time. I’m careful. Very methodical, professional. All right. Well, if I am a professional, then, no matter why this man was done, I did it for money. Professionals don’t kill in hot blood. So I killed this man for someone – and that means a contract, so we’re back to villains again, hard villains.

  Still, the killer did bungle, after all – he left the bags. Why? Did he think that if he threw them in the river they might surface too soon? That some of the, well, the contents might be found bobbing around by the river police? Did he calculate that it was safer to leave the bags here? Maybe. But maybe there was another element involved. Egoism. That was where plenty of killers came unstuck. I’m so cool, you wouldn’t believe. I’m orderly, too; always method in my madness! Anyway, you’ll never catch me, you berks, and meanwhile, look at the way I’ve stood these bags along this wall for you to find! Yes, that was what struck me right off when Bowman fed me into this. Orderly. A trademark. I did this, like painters used to sign in Latin under a picture when they finished it; I read about that somewhere. Well, killer, that was a bad mistake you made, leaving the bags here, and I’m going to nail you because of it.

  Next, what sort of a villain? Villains often kill the way they learned in a trade – chemists, doctors and mortuary assistants. But that’s delicate murder. At this level, killing isn’t. Even so, what sort of past? What trade can a villain have learned who coolly cooks a man away to the point where he can’t be identified? A cook? A butcher? A cook–butcher hit man? There can’t be many of them about. And he’s orderly. Cool.

  Anyway, all right then, after I’ve killed him what do I do? How do I use up the time while I’m waiting for him to come to the boil? How do I react? Go over? Shake hands with the mate? – Well done, John, nice one! Have a cup of tea? Do I help clear up the mess, or do I
just let John get on with that? I expect I do let him. I expect I always like to be in control though. No matter what, you can bet the killer watched everything the mate did; made sure it was done dead right. Did John start clearing up straight away? Or did they both linger over it – nice deserted spot, plenty of time. Bags of it. Yes, shopping bags. Maybe they got going after half an hour or so, after a sit-down. Had a soothing smoke. I know I’d have needed one. No sign of any ash or butts, though. I wonder – maybe I’m a non-smoker, non-drinker, tidy in my habits. Nothing slovenly about me, mate! Clean knickers three times a week and a bath Fridays! Look at the lovely neat way those bags are stood up! Wouldn’t his mum have been proud of him!

  Yes, it’s good, it’s professional, it really is, and that’s what narrows the field. Let’s go a bit on that, then. I kill. It’s my job. A job like any other job – no more to it than clearing a drain. And there’s money in it! Yes, money! No villain’s a charitable organization. Still, like all hard work it can be fun! Let’s make it fun; clean, orderly fun! Sick bastard. Sick, sick, right through to the back of his rotten brain.

  Now then. Where did I learn to kill so quick and so neat, have no fear of death and the mess that goes with it? On the streets? Could well be – in fact, almost certainly must have been. Middle-class killers are fastidious. Poison’s their favourite, or drugs; they don’t like getting themselves dirty. But a street killer doesn’t give a fuck about that. He likely started getting to know death as a kid. But where? Assuming I’m British (which of course I may not be, but assuming it), where do I learn to regard killing and death as normal, almost everyday events? Where on British territory? London? Hardly, though of course it’s possible, particularly round here. Or you’ve got Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Newcastle even – they’re all hard places. But where’s the hardest place of all, just as an assumption? Well, there’s, yes, there’s Belfast! And orderly. Didn’t you say the bags were orderly? All stood inside their police chalk marks, all lined up? Trained. Why yes, of course – surely it must have taken a trained man to do this lot. A trained man with a killer’s instinct, trained to kill as well as ready to kill, and for money. Money, because no two men would take risks like this if there were no money in it. They must have been working for someone who wanted to make the man in the bags unidentifiable. Train where, though? We’ve no national service now. But we’ve got, of course what we have got, is an army. An army. The army takes the best now. Killed, bled, fast-cooked, cook away the prints, the face, boil the blood away, destroy the teeth, clear up, no mess – yes, that could sound right. Carry on, corporal! Corporal?

  Now wait. Wait. A name there somewhere.

  Behind me the reporter coughed and I spun round; I had completely forgotten him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what do you think?’

  ‘What I think,’ I said, ‘is that the devil’s home on leave.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means there’s a maniac on the manor. What’s your name?’

  ‘Cryer.’ I watched while he made himself look at the bags, come closer up. ‘Tom Cryer,’ he said, ‘that’s me. I used to get teased about it at school.’

  ‘I expect you gave as good as you got.’ I had started to reopen the bags, kneeling over them as I spoke. Behind me Cryer said: ‘Do you have to do that? They’ve already been opened once. Do you have to do it again? Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said slowly, ‘but I have to. I’m no ghoul, but I have to do things my way, get my ideas, reach my conclusions my own way.’ Behind me I heard Cryer gulp, keeping his stomach in his mouth with his hand as I undid the bags. I pretended not to notice. I thought he was OK the way he stood his ground – a bright youth turning into a man, the romantic idea of being a crime reporter becoming grisly reality.

  ‘Don’t you sometimes wonder why you do this job?’ I said.

  ‘The public has a right to the facts,’ he muttered.

  ‘By Christ,’ I said, ‘I’m really surprised. You’re the first man from a national daily in a long time I’ve heard say that. Mostly they just think about the scoop.’ I had the first two bags open now, and had my hands into the contents. ‘Look out,’ I said. ‘It does smell when you get it out.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to put him together as much as possible the way he was.’ I let the boiled dollops of flesh and bone tumble out of the limp plastic, and opened the other bags. I found Bowman’s, the one with the head in it. Grey flesh and a few skeins of colourless hair clung to it. I squatted on the floor with it and turned it round and over; the features wobbled unrecognizably on the bone structure. The skin of the face had boiled off: the eyes were cooked blank. The lower jaw was in another bag. There were no teeth in either jaw, so there was no point in looking for dental records. The teeth themselves were nowhere to be found. I turned the skull face-down and said to Cryer: ‘You see that hole in the occiput? That’s the wound that killed him. What do you think of it?’

  ‘There’s no exit wound.’

  ‘That’s right. If it had been a bullet at close range, it would have had to come out somewhere, and it would have been found.’

  ‘It looks exactly like a bullet wound all the same.’

  ‘I know it does,’ I said. ‘It isn’t, but you can bet that whatever it was there was plenty of power behind it. Something sharp went wham, straight into his brain; he can’t have known a thing.’

  ‘Why do you keep saying him? Couldn’t it have been a woman?’

  ‘No, you can see it was a man from the shape of the pelvis.’

  ‘I couldn’t have told.’

  ‘That’s practice,’ I said, ‘and reading. I do a lot of that when I have time – pathologists’ textbooks, biographies. I’m a man troubled by meanings, and look where it’s got me – being here, doing this. Still, I won’t settle for anything less than the exact truth. Some of my colleagues think I’m just awkward on purpose, but what it really is – I seldom agree with my colleagues because too often their reasoning is based on the results they expect, and as such is generally ill-found. Excuse me for talking aloud while I work. Too many detectives I know ought to get out of the force altogether, though of course you get the bright ones.’

  I finished emptying the bags and laid the contents out. We both bent over what there was. There wasn’t much, so it didn’t tell us much. The blind flesh on the fingers was no help, just as Bowman had said it wouldn’t be. The knuckles and finger ends had popped out through the skin.

  ‘How will you ever find out who he was?’ Cryer said. He doubled up suddenly; I saw he was going to vomit by the grey sweat on his face.

  ‘Do it anywhere in the corner there,’ I said.

  He was horribly sick. When it was over he said: ‘Sorry. Had a big lunch today, early.’

  ‘With the mob from the news-desk?’

  ‘No, with my girl. Today’s her twenty-second birthday.’

  I looked at what lay on the floor, the smashed legs that I had fitted to the severed knees, the elbows, wrists, shoulder-blades and hands. I said: ‘Well, mind you look after her.’

  ‘I do my best,’ he said, ‘but women are so confident.’

  ‘They are till something happens to them.’

  ‘I have to do my job,’ he said, ‘that’s the trouble. I can’t be everywhere. I won’t let her get on a tube train by herself now, not after six at night. I lecture her till she starts yelling at me, but it’s her I’m thinking of.’

  ‘You lecture her,’ I said. ‘She might end up being glad of it.’

  He got out a packet of Kleenex and wiped his face. Now that he had reacted, he was calmer over what was on the floor. He repeated: ‘Do you think you will find out who he was?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It’s simpler than you might think,’ I said, ‘the murderer’s going to give me a hand. In fact, he’s started to already. The fact he’s left no trace, that’s a trace in itself. Second, he wasn’t alone; there were ce
rtainly at least two of them. Thirdly, the job was so well done that I’m certain it was done for money, and that probably means that the victim wasn’t just anybody. Therefore, I start looking for anybody who was somebody and who’s gone missing. They soon show up – by their absence, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Are you suggesting it was villains?’

  ‘You bet I am,’ I said. ‘Look at it. The only other possibility is that it was a nut, but I don’t buy it – it feels like a contract to me. And when it comes to a contract, who are among the first people to get hit?’

  ‘A grass?’

  ‘Dead right,’ I said. ‘My guess at the moment is that this wretched individual was most likely a grass, and a big-time one, too. There aren’t that many of them – that’s why, if I’m correct, I’m certain to find out who he was. And the moment I know that, and as soon as I find out what the weapon was that killed him, I shall start getting an idea of who to get after – though, mind, I’ve got the shadow of an idea already.’

  ‘What can I print?’ he said.

  ‘After what you’ve just been through? Anything you like.’

  ‘You could get in bother, giving me a free hand like that.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and I could get out of it too. I run my cases my way – that’s one great advantage of working on your own. And if the folk upstairs don’t like it they can fire me. They probably would’ve already, except that I’m not that easy to replace.’

  ‘Well, I want to feature it.’

  ‘Go on,’ I said, ‘I’m all for it. Print what you like; who knows, you might turn up something. Someone, somewhere, several people, they know whose body this is – and knowledge, that’s money, and aren’t we all into that? So offer a reward – say in the region of five long ones. But go easy on the contract angle; I’m not that far on yet – this is all theory so far. By the way,’ I added, ‘do you happen to know anything of what’s going on over at the ministry of defence?’