Hawes said: ‘Yes.’ He looked as if he knew what was coming.
Bowman said to the WPC: ‘Switch off.’ When she had he said to Hawes: ‘Now listen, lover, and listen hard. This is the bit that doesn’t figure on any tape. You can play this one of two ways; the one I strongly recommend to you is the one where you tell us off the record every fucking thing you know about this Hadrill business, including everything that happened up at that York factory which didn’t come out at your trial. You play square with us, Pat, and who knows, you might do yourself some good. If not, and this’ll equally be off the record, well, I’m wearing my old clothes, and Sergeant Rupt here, he’s in the battering business as well. The other sergeant on the left here, he’s easier tempered, but the thing with him is, he just don’t like a killer; in fact he hates the bastards. Well, that’s it. Now we’ll just wait a minute while you make up your mind.’
Silence fell. It was very quiet that day in the punishment block; I still remember the ringing silence in that row of unoccupied cells. When Bowman had stopped speaking it got even quieter during those moments that can never be measured in time until Hawes, knowing he was beaten, broke the silence and began to talk – slowly at first, until he hit his stride.
27
I was interviewing Klara McGruder in her Stoke Newington flat. It was in a state of painful squalor. Through the kitchen doorway I saw piles of dead bottles; part of her unmade bed showed opposite and the floor beside it was littered with dog-ends. She talked unendingly in a deep, blurred voice, and the smell of garbage in the place wouldn’t keep quiet either. On the lino-covered table between us a half-eaten plate of sardines wallowed in their oil; an empty whisky bottle towered above them.
Outside it was raining bitterly across a barren park where the grass had been trudged away by the aimless feet of the unemployed until the ground was just mud. I got up and went to look out through the rain. Below me a man spread his rags to show his chest as if it were a really fine day. His red lips gaped open inside his curly beard; the mouth closed only when it encountered the neck of the bottle that he kept picking up from the bench beside him. Rain ran over him, sliding down his ribs, subtle as a blackmailer.
Behind me Klara McGruder shifted on her battered couch.
‘OK,’ I said, still at the window. ‘Let’s go over it again. Your parents were Yugoslav. You were born in Paris. But you’re not a French national.’
‘I became British when I married that bastard.’
‘You wouldn’t have got it now,’ I said, ‘the British Nationality Act, 1981, would have put paid to that.’
‘Who cares anyway?’ she said. ‘Drunks don’t need passports. The only way they want to go is backwards, and there isn’t a passport for there.’ She started to daydream. ‘When I was a child we used to go out into the countryside round Paris at weekends. Les Andelys, I liked that best. Do you know Les Andelys?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ I said. ‘The few times I’ve been abroad, it’s only been to unpleasant countries.’
‘It was great in the summer.’ Her English wasn’t good. ‘You could smell the grass – God, it was something, after Belleville. I used to chew a stem and dream of what I’d be when I grew up. And this is it!’ she screamed. ‘Look at it! This shithole! This, and social security!’ She looked through me as if I wasn’t there. ‘Mum and Dad would be off somewhere nearby, screwing; they always did it in the country. But I used to lie on my back in another world, listening to the river, smelling the grass, dreaming.’ She started to cry.
I looked at the wreckage he had made of her and it was one more point in my book against Billy. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got to put these questions to you. First, how did you meet your husband?’
‘In Paris. We met one night in a bar by the Austerlitz station. All right, I was on the game. We got friendly. Friendly?’ She spat on the floor. ‘With him? With that bastard devil?’
‘You think of him as a devil?’
‘I did after the start. When he began beating me up.’ She was silent. ‘It’s no good,’ she said suddenly, ‘I’ve got to have a drink. Just thinking about it. You having one?’
‘No thanks.’ She disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a tumbler of neat scotch. She drank some, gagging over it. ‘Billy McGruder? Christ, I must have been out of my mind. He tortured me, too,’ she added. ‘Cigarette ends on my hands and face. Red-hot needles, big ones, four inches long.’
‘Yes, he’s into needles,’ I said, thinking of Wetherby. ‘What was he doing in Paris when you met him?’
‘He told me he was a paratroop sergeant with the British army and that he was on leave.’
‘The kind of leave he was on,’ I said, ‘was being released after doing seven years for murder.’
‘I know that now,’ she said, ‘but too late. It’s always too late for me.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘Are you joking?’ she shouted. ‘Look at me! I’m thirty-three, I can’t keep off the bottle, I’m finished, through, kaput.’
‘No children?’
‘I lost two through him. I miscarried with the first after a beating he gave me. He made me abort the other.’
‘What a smashing bloke. Does he know you live here?’
‘What?’ she whispered. ‘Christ, no, he’d kill me if he knew where I was.’ Fear stole over her face like an old carpet-slipper. ‘He always told me.’ She pushed back her hair and shook it out in an attempt to be a woman again; the hair might once have been gold. She drank the rest of her whisky at a gulp, looked at me with half-cut steadiness and said: ‘I know he did Jack Hadrill.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘It’s got the devil’s mark all over it. Christ, even I can read a newspaper, watch the telly. The humane killer? The plastic bags? That’s Billy all right. Ah, he was always neat, the bastard.’
‘You should have contacted us. Why didn’t you?’
‘I was too afraid. You don’t know what he’s like with a woman. But always neat, even when he came into you for a screw.’
‘Perfunctory?’
‘I don’t know what that means. I don’t know long English words. But if you mean he’d rather wank then the answer’s yes.’ She burst into frightening laughter. ‘And to think he married me because I talked him into it!’ Her face creased into what looked like merriment until you saw the expression that went with it. ‘I thought I was in love with him! With him!’
‘Why didn’t you leave him? Right back at the time when he started hurting you?’
‘You don’t leave a man like Billy,’ she said sombrely. She shuddered. ‘He leaves you. You’ve no will of your own if you’re living with him; that’s the first thing he takes off you. After any money you’ve got. He’s mean. And he left me. Often, and for a long time.’
‘When he went off to an army?’
‘That’s right. He said it was business. And then just as suddenly he’d be back. In the night. Like that. Any time. He’d suddenly be there in the room, with that cold smile he had.’
‘What did you do with yourself while he was away?’
A look crossed her face – the kind that always told me when there was a lie coming. ‘Nothing. I just tried to get him out of my mind.’
‘With alcohol?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Nothing more?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I don’t believe you,’ I said. ‘You’re lying to me, and I know why; it’s because you’re afraid. But you’ve no need to lie to me, Mrs McGruder, it’s the other way round. You’ve got to tell me the truth, because that way, by holding nothing back, you might tell me something that’ll help me nail McGruder and put him away.’ I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. ‘All right then,’ I said quietly, ‘OK, there was a man now, wasn’t there, while Billy was away?’
‘Well, he was a lousy lover. Give a woman any pleasure? Him? Never.’
‘Did Billy know abo
ut it?’
‘I hope to Christ not,’ she said. ‘But sooner or later he finds out about everything. He might know, and just be waiting till he finds me, or till it suits him. Then I’ll suffer. Battery cables. Terminals on my breasts and on my you know what. Needles. Fags. Fists too, of course. Everything he learned on interrogation courses in the army. Christ, I’m sick with terror just knowing he’s around – can’t you arrest him? You must be able to do the bastard for something.’
‘No, I can’t,’ I said, ‘not yet.’
‘When will you be able to?’
‘Perhaps soon,’ I said, ‘perhaps not. But the more you can tell me the sooner it’ll be. Where did you live with him?’
‘At a place we had over in Queenstown Road.’
‘All right, Klara,’ I said. ‘Now, who was the other man?’ I had the electric feeling I was onto something, but I spoke patiently, easily. She was already drunk. There was no point trying to rush her.
‘Billy brought him back to Queenstown Road one night some years back. They told me to fuck off; they had business, Billy said, so I went out to the pub. When I came back at closing time the man had gone. But at different times after that he’d be back; sometimes we used to sit and talk, the three of us. And drink. I could tell he fancied me; a woman always knows. Then one night, after Billy had gone – abroad on business, he said – this bloke came round. We sat and drank for a while, and then it started.’
‘I just want his name, Klara,’ I said. ‘That’s all. Just the name.’
‘I daren’t.’
‘Look, Klara,’ I said, ‘if it comes to the worst I can arrange for you to be watched. It’s not easy, because we’re always short of men. But I could do it.’
‘You promise? You give me your word?’
‘If you find you’re in danger on account of information you’ve given me then yes, I give you my word.’
She sighed, closing her eyes and putting her hands on her knees. On the back of her hands I noticed red angry scars. ‘Yes, it’ll be a relief,’ she said, ‘if it’ll help put that devil away where he can’t do any more harm. It’ll have been worth it, even if something happened to me.’ She looked at me and said: ‘Well, it was Pat Hawes.’
‘Thank you, Klara,’ I said. Excitement surged through me. Everything fitted. The business they were discussing years ago was murder – Wetherby’s murder. I thought, if we could have got hold of Klara then, we’d have had the evidence that would have nailed McGruder for that. Meantime I had lost Klara again. She had refilled with scotch, and was talking about her father.
‘Did Hawes tell you anything while you were going with him?’ I said. ‘Anything you think I ought to know?’
She shook her head. ‘Pat Hawes was no talker,’ she said, ‘he was a grunter. All he wanted was a rough fuck. That’s all they ever want, the men I get. Women with them, they don’t get no credit for brains.’ She started crying again.
‘Hadrill was never mentioned? A man called Edwardes?’
Her reddened eyes gazed at me as though she were surprised I was still there. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I never asked questions, they was always good for a smack with Billy.’
I thought, you don’t surprise me. Billy’s a psychopath; he laughs on the surface; often, I’ve seen him do it. But the expression on his face has nothing to do with what he’s thinking or feeling at all.
‘When we lived in France,’ said Klara, ‘I always used to have good feelings about the English. We used to watch them playing football on TV. Big, solid men. Kind-looking. Anyway, after Belgrade.’
I didn’t say anything; I was thinking about what I had just found out.
Klara was wandering, but after a while she started up again. ‘All music’s like the wind,’ she said. ‘My mother was from Titograd; she worked on a collective there. She’s been dead a while now. Yes, she used to say, music’s like the wind. You hear it and then it’s gone; it takes the people who played it, the people who listened, and its pleasure and damage with it. You could hear the same music, perhaps, at another time, in a different place; but it would be played by other people even though they looked like the same people, yet you would never hear it the same way again.’ Scotch came back into her mouth raw, but she held it with her hand to her mouth, and a tear like a varnished fingernail slipped down her face. ‘My father was from Despotovac, a village on the Zagreb–Belgrade road. In the winter it was buried under snow. The children had one dress, the same as for summer, and one pair of boots, and they crept out to go for the bread under a black sky full of snow, under pine trees loaded with ice.’
It should have been drunken melodrama but it wasn’t, and I sat listening silently in the dark room; by talking of children, Klara McGruder had brought Dahlia into my mind.
I stood up. ‘Well, I’ll be going,’ I said.
She gazed up at me blearily. ‘Have a drink. Just one. It’s so lonely by yourself.’
‘I can’t,’ I said, ‘I’ve got too much to do. Another time.’ I scribbled down the number of the Factory and my home number on a page out of my notebook and put it on the table.
‘Ring me at either of these numbers. Any time, if you feel afraid.’
But she had lain back. Her eyes had closed, her despair making her look like death, her face purple and swollen in the wicked shadows.
I went quietly downstairs. The weather had turned sick. It had stopped raining, but the air was like thunder over the puddles in the street. The heavy lorries were jammed solid and it was too warm for April, sickly warm; it was weather that made me sweat. I went over to the tube station to buy a paper, and the headlines were that Pat Hawes had gone on the hot cross. I didn’t bother ringing the Factory; I just bought a ticket and went on down to the platform reading the story.
28
When I got in to the Factory, there was a man waiting for me from Serious Crimes, a sergeant from Bowman’s crew.
‘Christ, we’ve been looking everywhere for you!’
‘Well, you didn’t look in the right place.’
‘You’re meant to carry a bleeper so you can be contacted.’
‘I’d look a bloody fool questioning a man,’ I said, ‘and then just when you’re getting to the interesting bit that thing goes off in your pocket.’
‘All the same,’ he said. I could tell he always carried one like a good boy. ‘Anyway, what the panic is, Pat Hawes is out of Wandsworth.’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said, ‘I just read it in the paper.’
‘Well, you’ve got to go up and see Superintendent George.’
When I got up there George said: ‘Jesus, what a flap. Hawes – we’ve got every copper in the country looking for him. You saw him the other day – any idea where he might be?’
‘I might have,’ I said, ‘on a hunch basis.’
‘What did he go on the hot cross for? Jail fever?’
‘You could put it like that,’ I said. ‘The man was sick with fright; he’d been well leaned on. He had to go where we couldn’t get at him again; some of my questions were near the bone. Also, he talked to us.’
‘You’re on this plastic bags business.’
‘Yes, it’s all connected.’
‘Well, we’ve got to get this bastard.’
‘How did he get out?’ I said. ‘Usual? You bag the screw who sold him the key?’
‘That’s only a matter of time,’ said George, ‘there’s four over at that nick we’ve an eye on.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, ‘you can book him for flogging the key but that won’t tell us anything more.’
‘It’s a right fuck-up,’ said George. ‘You’re on the plastic bags thing, we’re onto catching Hawes, we’re all tripping over each other, it’s like Charlie Chaplin.’
‘Screws aren’t millionaires,’ I said, ‘they’ll take a chance where the money’s right and their wages are wrong, and won’t the heavy Sundays have fun with it? Hawes went straight out of the main gate, did he?’
‘It’s hardly w
orth putting them inside,’ said George, ‘not the well-heeled ones. Motor waiting right out there.’
‘Well, it’s pathetic,’ I said. ‘What they call a security wing in a prison these days, it’ll hardly keep a sardine in its tin.’
‘If you’re going to tackle it,’ said George, ‘you’d better get your skates on, it’s going right up the ladder this one is, you’ll see – the brass is running about like a chicken with its head cut off.’
29
I knocked, and after a time McGruder opened the door.
‘It’s me, Billy.’
‘What do you want this time? I’m really busy, copper. Why not another day?’
‘You’re never too busy to see me,’ I said.
‘What do you want?’
‘To have a look round.’ I was already doing it. ‘You got Pat Hawes here?’ I called to him from the bedroom.
‘I never even heard of him till I read about that jail break he made in the papers.’
‘You certainly read the papers, don’t you?’ I said, rejoining him. ‘It’s all right,’ I added, ‘I didn’t expect to find Hawes here; even you’re not that stupid.’
‘I’m not stupid at all.’
‘That’s what really stupid people always say.’ I’d only mentioned Hawes to give my Billy a jolt. Now I gave him another. ‘Your wife around?’
‘Wife? What wife?’
‘Our records tell us you had a wife. Klara, maiden name of Godorovic. What have you done with her? Divorced her? Killed her? Cooked and eaten her?’
‘That cow,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen her for years, I don’t know where she is.’
The Devil's Home on Leave (Factory 2) Page 14