‘You sleep together?’
‘With Nacker? Yes.’ He was still looking away. ‘He’s dead now. He wasn’t right for a soldier nor a villain.’
‘You miss him?’
‘I don’t think about him.’
Yet I was reminded of a poem I had learned at school called ‘Sorrow Lane’:
I’ll just turn down this lane here
Into our sorrow;
I’m afraid today is lost
And we’ve mortgaged tomorrow.
I’ve got us into Sorrow Lane
Through darkness and thunder;
I’ll shine our lights again,
But I know we’re going under.
Don’t put on black for our grief
Or wear a veil;
But pray for us, we entreat,
As the nights grow pale.
Lift us and save us both, Christ,
After the horror;
We’ve fallen through today
And won’t make it tomorrow.
How sweet life was,
How deep its truth and love;
Like the water we kissed by
With August above.
Then we gave all we had
Till we had to borrow;
Now we’re alone and sad
In the grove of our sorrow.
Farewell, sweet hours of night,
Farewell, sweet air;
The others are out in the light
But we aren’t there.
Help never came
And now help never can;
Pray for my woman’s soul,
Pray for the man.
‘I’m not a copper right now, Billy,’ I said, ‘I’m just a man. Forget I’ve got a job to do for a minute; why not just talk to me?’
He stared at me without any expression at all, and I knew it was no use. He would always come out in pieces, in fury and despair, his way of describing a sense of loss. He would feel for a second, or a minute, if you reached out far enough to him; but he was too far gone, with violence behind him, violence in front and beside him. Like a broken piano, he could only make discords.
‘I spend a lot of time on my own,’ McGruder said, ‘people like me always do. I’m no good at talking.’
‘Maybe you read.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m a great reader. Most of what I read’s a load of rubbish. I could write better than most of them. The things I’ve done, I could write a book that’d knock them all out.’ It was surprising, the number of psychopaths that told you that. Their intelligence, usually high, remained unimpaired, whatever their problems. It was also completely divorced from those problems, and that was what made them so bloody dangerous. ‘One time,’ he said, ‘I got nicked in South Africa. There was a little trouble in Johannesburg – never mind that. I got hold of a book on hand-reading, palmistry it’s called; it was in the prison library. You know anything about hands?’
‘I go by their shapes a lot,’ I said, ‘but that’s just an instinct.’
‘There’s more to it than that.’
He put out his own hand flat, palm upwards. In his weird way, he was trying to reach me through hands, and I was prepared to let him. I was prepared to try anything to get at the truth. I was in my usual false position; I was a copper with a job to do gaining a killer’s trust so that I could nick him. I couldn’t see Bowman talking to McGruder or anybody else about hands; I could almost hear his peals of ridiculing laughter. Yet any way was a good way if it got you ahead, and I had to get a man with a brain just as good as mine to commit himself. This wasn’t like dealing with Pat Hawes, or a devious landlord – straight force wouldn’t get me anywhere with Billy McGruder; he knew about straight force all too well, and he laughed at it.
The first part of catching a man is easy – the part when you know who it is you want. It’s when you get to know him, that’s when I find it difficult. I don’t like deceit, even when it’s a killer I’m dealing with. I was pretending I was trying to help him, when all I wanted to do was to help him into jail.
‘This part of my hand,’ McGruder was saying, ‘see, this line, it’s called the head line. It’s straight and true. I know it looks bent, it takes a downward curve at the end there. But that’s imagination and desire.’
I knew he had neither. That was knowledge I could see he had buried; its absence was as plain as murder itself.
‘There’s the violence in me, of course,’ he said with a touch of pride. ‘You can see it here, look. And here. Look at the life line,’ he said, indicating it to me and gazing at it. ‘See? It’s bad; I could die any day! At thirty-three! The line’s short, the same on both hands. That makes it worse. I’m also very mystic.’
He droned on, completely – and what was worse, unconsciously – absorbed in himself, and suddenly I realized what hell it meant, not only to be a killer, but a bore. You think nothing of taking life; but your own existence fascinates you, and that’s the imbalance that we mean by evil. Paolacci, or Edie, even that I could understand better. But this neat, dull man crouched in a sort of mass over his own hands, that freaked me.
At last he let his hands fall to his sides. I was about to yawn with relief when he raised them to his face to look at just once more. ‘These have to do the work,’ he said, nodding raptly. ‘Yes.’
It was the angle of murder the public never sees unless a member of it is just about to be topped by one of these maniacs. I remembered – I seldom forgot – the murdered old lady I had found by the side of the motorway years ago. I said: ‘The hands do it to just anybody, do they?’
‘Just about.’
‘Do they do it to old women?’
‘What?’ he shouted. He looked horrified. ‘Me do a thing like that to an old lady? Never!’
‘Suppose she was well off. Money in it.’
‘Not at all!’
‘You lying, self-deceiving cunt,’ I said, ‘if the money were right you’d top a handicapped child in a wheelchair, cop for the lolly and bank it. You’re full of shit, piss and death, McGruder, so don’t try and launder yourself with me, friend.’
He danced towards me, eyes glittering with fury.
‘Get off, get away from me,’ I said, ‘you wanking berk. If a girl came up to you in the street with heartbreak in her face and said please help me, my man’s shot himself, you’d walk straight on to improve your image, you pitiful egoist.’
He stared at me for a long time; nothing in his face moved. At last he shook his head slowly, his eyes never leaving mine. ‘You are so close to the edge, copper,’ he said, ‘you just cannot know.’
But I didn’t care. I remembered Jim Macintosh who used to work with me at A14. He’s been dead since 1981, killed in circumstances like these, by a bastard like this.
‘The trouble with you,’ I said, ‘is that you never tell me anything new – get us another beer.’
When he came back with them he poured them and said: ‘While I was in the kitchen I was thinking of what you were saying about that bird, the one that shot her bloke.’
‘What a slip,’ I said. ‘She didn’t shoot anybody. The man shot himself.’
‘Well, anyway,’ he said. His eyes took on that sharp yet absent look that they often had, and he began one of his great quiet tirades. ‘Women? I don’t need women. I shit women. I use them. Me, I’m unique. I’m going to change the world; it says so in my hand.’
‘You’ve changed it for some people,’ I said. ‘They’re out of it.’
He took no notice. He had his hand out in front of his face again and he said: ‘I’m a black Christ, a white Satan. I take what I need from folk, just passing through, see? I could be tender to them, I could threaten them, but I get it from them. I’m bound to get it. Anyone tries to make Billy McGruder look small – no one tries to make me look small.’
‘I do,’ I said.
He flicked his razor a millimetre in front of my nose; that’s a psychopath for you. ‘Belt up and watch your step,’ he said calmly. ‘I have
n’t finished. I read this book in the nick once, at Wandsworth, that a screw got in to me, there’s one man like me born once every 666 years.’
I thought that was often enough, but all I said was: ‘I read somewhere, I think it was the Bible, that that number was the mark of the beast.’
‘You’re taking the piss out of me,’ he said softly. He came up to within half a pace of me and stared into my eyes. ‘Don’t you ever do that.’
‘So you’re telling me you’re special, not like other men.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And so you are,’ I said, ‘you’re a convicted killer, and proud of it. How many people have you killed altogether, Billy?’
‘I’m not saying; I’m a very private man. But – and this is off the record, right? – I reckon they all ought to be glad. They were all a pain in the arse to themselves and a lot of other people.’
‘I like it when you moralize, Billy. Tell me, if you were looking into the dark end of my pistol now, would you be glad? Would you be thinking, I’m glad I’m going to be shot dead after all, I’m just a pain in the arse to myself and everyone else?’
He gazed at me motionless, his eyes like stones. ‘A man on his own like you are,’ he said at last, ‘ought to have more sense than say a thing like that to me.’ He half took the razor out of his pocket again.
‘Cut out the crap,’ I said, ‘and for the last time, put that fucking razor away. Now then. You killed that army corporal up in the Midlands, Brownlow. The whole world knows that. So who else are you responsible for, Mr fucking Six Six Six? Jackie Hadrill?’
He didn’t say a word, just stared at me with the unblinking eyes of a snake, his face dead between his tight, questioning little ears.
‘Merrill Edwardes, now,’ I said, ‘when you blew half his head away with a sawn-off shotgun. Do you reckon he was sold on that as a way to go?’
‘I’ve never met either of them,’ he lilted, ‘I keep telling you. Mind,’ he added, ‘from what I’ve heard of folk like that around the manor, I’d say they were no great loss to the world.’
‘Look, I know we’ve all got to go some time,’ I said, ‘but what amazes me is the way you manage to miss out the terror of the moment. You almost manage to make it sound a great way, your way to go.’
For some mystifying reason, that cheered him up. He had no sense of the ridiculous whatever, and that made him ridiculous, like some sexual perverts. He made a proud little noise in his throat.
‘You did those two men all right, Billy,’ I said. ‘I’m satisfied. All I need now is the proof. You bled off and cooked Hadrill – the job you had time for. You did it with Edwardes. But Edwardes was a rush job; you had to just catch Edwardes and chill him. I’ll find out why, but my guess at present is that he tried to grass you. And another reason why I like you best for Hadrill, Billy, is the way your pad looks – neat and prissy. You’re so tidy in your habits. Yes, you and Edwardes did Hadrill in cold blood on orders from Pat Hawes. And you did him for money, the way you always do.’
‘Get out of here fast,’ said McGruder suddenly, coming up to me again with his right hand in his pocket. ‘I’m patient, but right now I just mightn’t care what I did. Get out; do it now.’
‘All right,’ I said, walking past him to the door. ‘Still, one of these days you’re going to tell me why you were in such a sweat over Edwardes, and soon now you’ll be telling me just how it happened to Hadrill down there by the river.’ I opened the door. ‘I’ll be going, Billy. Just for the time being.’
23
The next day, Monday, I was ordered to sit a board. I knew what the board was for.
‘I don’t want to sit it,’ I told the voice, ‘I haven’t time. Everybody knows I’m in the middle of this Hadrill business; it’s mad.’
‘That’s not for you to say,’ said the voice, ‘and boards can’t wait.’ He paused and then said, ‘Besides, don’t you realize it’s to do with your possible transfer to the Branch?’
‘You know I’ve been turned down there once,’ I said, ‘but I’m not bitter. I’m fine here at Unexplained Deaths.’
‘Maybe you are,’ said the voice, ‘but that isn’t the point. If the board decides you’re fit material, it’d be your duty to transfer. Christ, what am I arguing with you for? Any police officer would give his teeth for it.’
‘I’ll hang onto my teeth,’ I said, ‘the false ones cost me nearly a hundred quid; I had them done privately after I lost my own that time over at Arnos Grove when it went the other way.’
‘I’m not interested in that now,’ said the voice.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘well, I’m not interested in the board.’
‘Are you telling me that you’re refusing to take it?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m not going to take the board. I’m quite entitled to refuse.’
‘All right, then,’ said the voice, ‘you’re obviously going to have to have this the hard way – it’s an order that you sit the board.’
‘I don’t care whose order it is.’
‘But it’s the Commissioner’s order!’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Tell them it’s the plastic bags; I can’t drop that now. Tell them I don’t want to know about any board.’
‘I’m transmitting an order to you, sergeant.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘and I’m telling you I won’t obey it.’
‘Now look,’ said the voice with a trace of uneasiness, ‘you’ve got to take the board, do you understand?’
‘It’s no use threatening me,’ I said. ‘No one’s going to force me to take it.’
‘Force?’ said the voice. ‘Force? That’s far too strong a word.’
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘let’s play this again, what are you all doing? I’m just getting warm on this business, then I suddenly find I’m obliged to take a board I’ve already failed once, maybe because of what happened in my personal life – I had a mad wife who murdered my daughter, remember, there’s no secret about it. But why do I have to retake the bloody thing? I accepted their decision the last time; I don’t care, I tell you.’
‘I haven’t all day to discuss this,’ said the voice. ‘You’ll do as you’re told and take the board, that’s all.’
‘And if I won’t, I resign. Is that it?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s been decided at a high level that you don’t want to remain a sergeant at A14 for the rest of your days. Everyone, including myself, has recommended you. And that’s that – you’re going to be promoted and transferred.’
‘And Hadrill?’
‘I imagine they’ll send that back to Serious Crimes.’
They hold these boards over at the Yard, and I was sent to a neon-lit waiting room. Other candidates were already sitting there on steel chairs. I sat down, but I was unable to think of anything but McGruder.
They called me finally; I was last. I dug my hands into my trouser pockets, went through a door with a green light over it which said Enter, and walked down a featureless room towards a table with people sitting at it. No one asked me to sit down, but there was a chair there, so I sat on it. There was a clerk present, busy being a clerk. He had what I supposed was my file in front of him, and his hands shuffled about with the contents while his eyes watched what his hands were doing in a needle sort of way. I thought Christ, what do they need people like that for these days? A home computer could have shot through it all and printed out whatever they needed at twenty times the speed. Then there were two uniformed officers, and one senior detective in plain clothes. I knew him by sight. He was Detective-Superintendent Reid, and I thought, you ought to be busy on something else, the murder rate we’ve got in this city.
There was also a psychiatrist. There’s always a bloody psychiatrist.
One of the uniformed men leaned across the table and looked me up and down with distaste; I wondered if I’d left my fly open or what. He said: ‘Well, sergeant, the problem you’ve got to solve is this. You’ve been summoned by a special committee a
t the Home Office; they want your reaction to a terrorist act that’s just been committed against a sensitive embassy in central London. A vital point – East–West relations mustn’t be upset. The PM’s waiting for the committee’s decision. Well? What do you recommend?’
‘It’s a silly question,’ I said, ‘when I’m in the middle of a real murder.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ said the other uniformed man. He was sitting in the middle, and was therefore plainly the chairman. ‘Would you repeat that?’
I did repeat it, louder than before.
‘You’re not doing yourself any good, you know,’ said the chairman, ‘taking that attitude.’
‘No, I know I’m not,’ I said. I didn’t say anything else. There was a silence which I was evidently expected to fill. But I didn’t fill it, so the chairman, after fidgeting in his chair, finally said: ‘You must say something, now.’
‘I’m afraid mythical situations don’t stimulate me,’ I said.
‘Even so.’
I yawned. ‘Well, I’d do what anyone else would do – assemble a squad, men I knew well, draw the weapons we needed, and get in there any way we could.’
‘East–West relations mustn’t—’
‘Fuck that,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to get in there fast. It’s people’s lives that matter, not East–West relations. Then, when you’ve done all that, some tweedy individual from the PM’s office wanders along and tells you you’ve done it all wrong, so you don’t get promoted, just bollocked, and that’s it.’ I looked at my watch and said: ‘I’d like to get out of here now, if you don’t mind; I’ve got a lot on.’
The chairman glared icily at me. Something more seemed to be expected of me so I said: ‘And East–West relations? Don’t make me laugh. I read the papers thoroughly enough to know that they only exist in people’s minds, unless you call a nuclear arms race East–West relations.’
‘You seem to see the future pretty black,’ said the other uniformed man.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said, ‘and the longer I sit here answering a lot of idiotic questions, the blacker it’ll get.’
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