I went up through the morgue door by three shallow steps in the wet spring wind, feeling the concrete through the soles of my shoes, and was immediately in the atmosphere of that frozen and terrible place while I was still only at the desk. Since I had no manners, I didn’t bother with any but just went up to the clerk at the desk and slapped my card down, saying, ‘Police, A14.’
The man at the desk said: ‘What’s it down to?’ and I answered ‘You can think yourself lucky it’s not you, it’s 87471 and 2 Carstairs/Suarez, and I’m pushed, so can we get on with it?’ He was going to start moaning but I pointed my forefinger at his head in a gesture for him not to bother, so he jabbed his thumb irritably towards the lift the other side of the empty hall. I walked off across the fake marble through the special odour hospitals have and came up to the duty porter, a bald, bearded boy swabbing away at the tiles with a mop tied into a rag; he also had a green plastic bucket for company, which he brought up beside him with his foot from time to time. Mop, bucket and man looked weary under the state-paid neon lights. I said: ‘This service lift working?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘don’t take no notice where it says out of order, it’s repaired now. I’m going for a break myself,’ he added, thumbing the lift button. ‘Which floor, canteen?’
‘No, the one under the food,’ I said. ‘The morgue.’
‘You want the basement then,’ he said, ‘and well, there, I’m sorry for you; sad down there, isn’t it?’ I didn’t answer, so he said: ‘Don’t worry, it’s pretty reasonable your being depressed going down there, I’ll take you down and see myself all right after. OK, here we go.’
The bell rang on the down arrow and the doors hissed open. As we got in he said: ‘You haven’t got a smoke on you by any chance?’
I gave him my half-full packet of Westminsters and said: ‘Take the lot. It’s all right, I’ve got another.’
‘Nice one,’ he said, lighting up, ‘Christ, this’ll do me all the way back to Manpower. Anyway, well, here you are.’ The lift stopped with a sighing bump. He saw me out and pressed the button to go back up to the canteen for tea and tabs. As the door was closing in his face he added: ‘So long, mate, mind how you go now, take care.’
The morgue was an area so vast that its tiled walls, the colour of tired ice, looked grey even under the sunlight that filtered as yellow water through the opaque roof. I breathed formaldehyde; the place was deserted except for two assistants far down the place, just boys, both shod in tired blue Dot Martins, who were leaning against a surface enjoying a smoke.
I said in a general way: ‘Doctor Lansdown in?’
‘No. Out.’
‘Get him in.’
‘What makes you so special?’
‘The taxpayer,’ I said, ‘I’m a police officer.’
‘You got an appointment with the doctor?’
I said: ‘You must be brand-new on this earth. The police don’t need appointments. We make them and folk keep them.’
‘I don’t know about any of that,’ the one in front said. His face was white, freckled, and framed in pale orange curls. ‘Your best plan is go and see Mr Veale in Room G4, it’s just down the corridor. He’ll fix you up.’
‘There’s a danger it might all go the other way,’ I said, ‘if it was Mr Veale.’
‘Why’s that, then?’
I said: ‘He mightn’t have made his will.’ I pointed to a phone in a corner and said: ‘Does that work?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Let’s try it anyway,’ I said. A voice I was getting to know well came on and I said: ‘I am about ten yards away from you, Veale, and even fewer seconds, now get Doctor Lansdown in here or say your last prayer, I’m in the morgue. Either the doctor comes to see me or else I come to see you, and you really don’t need that, Veale.’ A nasal rattle started up the other end; I put the phone down on it.
Soon we heard footsteps in the long corridor I had come in by. I turned to the others and said: ‘See? It’s easy.’
But they had faded.
A man in his fifties wearing an open white coat over an expensive suit appeared and walked up to me. I said: ‘Doctor Lansdown?’
He looked very fit, tired and stricken. He said: ‘Carstairs/Suarez?’
‘That’s right.’
He said: ‘It’s Suarez. Have you examined her?’
‘As she was found. I’m in charge of the case. Why?’
He said: ‘Are your nerves good?’
‘I’ve seen most things. Why?’
‘You’re going to have to look at something you may not have seen,’ the pathologist said, ‘that’s why. I’m just saying that it’s very important that whatever you see now, you must control yourself and remain calm.’ He added: ‘It won’t be easy.’
I said: ‘If what you have to show me could help me find her killer,’ I said, ‘then I guarantee I’ll remain calm.’
Lansdown said: ‘Poor child. It might.’ He added: ‘I’ve examined the dead here for twenty-two years, and I found it difficult to stay calm over her.’ He looked me in the eyes. ‘That’s what’s delayed my report – there were checks I had to make.’ He turned away from me and looked suddenly like a cheap curtain when the rod across its window breaks. He said: ‘Did you think you had seen all of Suarez when you saw her?’
I said: ‘What more is there?’
He said: ‘Did you touch her?’
I couldn’t tell him how I had kissed her dead hair that still smelled of apples. I said: ‘No.’
He said: ‘She was dressed when you saw her?’
‘Of course.’
‘You didn’t interfere with her clothing?’
I said: ‘Doctor Lansdown, as a police officer I was there to examine the position of the bodies and to examine the flat.’
He said: ‘I’m afraid you’ve seen nothing yet, then. Nothing of 87471 at all.’
There was a stool beside a vacant bench; Lansdown pointed to it and said: ‘Why don’t you sit down?’
I said: ‘Christ no. I’m not the kind that needs to sit down.’
‘It was to try and prepare you,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen death here every day for twenty years – but I’ve never seen anything worse than this.’
I said: ‘I’ve seen violent death as often as you have.’
‘I know, but until you’ve seen Suarez you can’t imagine what she went through.’ He added: ‘Don’t tell me she hasn’t marked you, too.’ Then he said, turning away: ‘I’ll just get Wiecienski, we work together. His name’s Andrew. He’s Polish, the rest of the people here are just a farce.’
He went to the door and called out: ‘Wiecienski! Are you there?’
A distant voice said yes, he was there.
The pathologist shouted: ‘Bring the Suarez file with you, Andrew — 87471.’
The voice said in accented English: ‘Who’ve you got with you?’
‘Someone who apparently wants to see some justice done around the place.’
‘What?’ said the voice. ‘I didn’t know there were any of them left.’
Wiecienski came in and put the file marked Suarez D-87471 on the edge of a desk by the door. He was a heavy man of about fifty, with blond hair that looked as if it had been rained on. The pathologist said: ‘Bring her over, Andrew. Bring her out covered so that at first the officer here can see only what he saw of her before.’
She arrived on a chrome trolley, wheeled slowly over by Wiecienski. She was clean, bloodless and frozen; her blind eyes, black under their heavy lids, shone brilliantly up into the hard light that Wiecienski had switched on over her. She lay half-turned on her side like goods being delivered at an exclusive address on ice; and the unmarked side of her dark head that showed above the towel, lying on its cheek, reminded me of a girl lying stiffly asleep, as long as you did not look too closely – her lips parted on a dream word. The pathologist turned to me and said: ‘I’m going to take the towel away now.’
I said: ‘Do it.’
The doctor took the towel very s
oftly by its two corners from under Dora’s chin and in silence folded it down as far as her shins – and when that gesture revealed the rest of Dora’s body, whose state had been concealed from me in the flat by her dress, my stomach came up to the front of my mouth and I thought, ‘Christ, I’m going to spew,’ but I just controlled it. ‘All right,’ I said. After a moment I leaned over the body again and this time found that I could look at it.
‘Andrew,’ the pathologist said, ‘will you just help me to turn her?’ As they were doing it the pathologist said ‘I want you to see her anus.’
When they had it displayed, I said: ‘What is that abominable thing Dora has there, like a mushroom?’
The doctor said: ‘That’s a development of herpes simplex, orchestrated with mucocutaneous warts.’
I looked. Some of the mushroom had burst. I said: ‘How did she manage to defecate through that?’
He said: ‘It was an intolerable agony for her, made worse by the fact that as she crouched on the loo she must have looked at her thighs and seen these, and these, and these, see? Look, here, here and here.’
I looked at the dark, disfiguring plaques on her upper thighs and said to Lansdown: ‘What is it?’
‘It’s classic Karposi’s sarcoma. Why, haven’t you ever had to deal with a case of AIDS before?’
I said: ‘How did she get into this state?’
He said: ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out. That’s why this report on her’s delayed. I’m a pathologist, not an AIDS specialist, so I got on to Westminster where they’ve got a specialist team; they came over, examined her, took samples, and I’m waiting. Don’t rush them,’ he added. ‘Particularly as it’s a case of murder they’re doing their best, but it takes time.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘yet you realise that from my point of view I’ve got to find the killer.’
‘I know,’ he said.
‘So that the longer your report takes, the further away he’ll get. Could you ring Westminster?’
‘Look, it’s arranged,’ said Lansdown. ‘I have a permanent line open here – if I’m out, Wiecienski’s in and vice versa, and the second they’ve got anything, they’ll be on. The head of the team they sent over was Johnson. He was in charge of the Suarez examination and there aren’t six men in this country who know more about AIDS than he does.’
‘Did he say anything?’ I said. ‘Anything at all? Because what’s beginning to interest me more and more is how she caught this.’
‘After an hour he said he couldn’t understand how her lower intestine had got into the state it is. He told me: “It’s the vehicle by which the virus was introduced into her that I can’t make out – it wasn’t the male organ.” After he had looked into her lower stomach anally and then got film of it he said to me: “The colon is abnormally dilated and appears to have been scraped raw and eaten in places. But I shall have to analyse the film, of course.” Then he turned to me suddenly and said: “To put it vulgarly, what was left of her colon wouldn’t make a paper handkerchief worth sneezing into.’ ”
‘In your opinion, was she correct in what she wrote, in the book of hers that I found, that she was dying anyway?’ I said.
‘Oh yes,’ said Lansdown. ‘Look at her – here, here and here.’ He took up a pair of forceps and curled her upper lip back from the gum. ‘You see this gingevitis, the teeth exposed to the roots? Hairy leukoplakia on the side of the tongue here? And here? That’s a proliferation of the Epstein-Barr virus. Oral thrush, aphthous growths right at the rear of the cavity, epiglottis generally infected – these are secondary infections, but they often spread downwards into the lungs, usually presenting as some relatively untreatable, because rare, form of pneumonia, pneumocystis carinii, toxoplasma, or pneumococcal lobar.’ He added: ‘While you can stabilise some of these infections temporarily, there is no guarantee that they won’t recur or manifest themselves differently in other parts of the body – advanced AIDS, in our present state of knowledge, is irreversible and the prognosis in the case of Suarez, negative.’
‘How long would she have had to live?’ I said.
‘Anywhere between three months and three years,’ said Lansdown, ‘but Johnson’s opinion was from six to twelve months.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘anyway she had made up her mind to kill herself.’
‘I can understand that,’ said Lansdown.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘only then in rushes your man and saves her the trouble by taking an axe to her the night she’d decided to do it.’
The phone rang and Lansdown went over to it. He listened and said: ‘There’s a police officer upstairs in the main hall, wants to know if he can come down.’
‘He give a name?’
‘It’s a Detective Sergeant Stevenson.’
I took the phone and said: ‘I don’t know why you’re here.’
He said: ‘I think I might.’
‘Come down anyway,’ I said. ‘Someone’ll show you the way.’
‘I know the way.’
‘Avoid a man called Veale,’ I said.
While I was waiting for Stevenson I walked away from the others to a tall window and looked out over London. Words of Dora’s poured through me:
I am too fragile; I shall never find the courage to free myself – I’m blocked, I’m dying, I can’t move. I saw him last night on the waste ground behind his place where we meet now and I told him this; he turned on me like a viper and said, ‘I’ll kill you, you bitch.’ He took me by the wrist so hard I thought he was going to break it. He said: ‘I can’t yet,’ then he threw me on the ground and just trotted off, shaking his hair out of his eyes.
I thought, ‘Yes, but who the hell was he? Where was this piece of waste ground? What couldn’t he do yet?’ I was certain she was talking about her killer – but Dora never named places, never once named people.
There had then been a page after that on which, marking it with a star, she had added in her swift, angular writing:
Some hand will come for me, I know it will. Meanwhile, the last battle is in the sitting room
—and as I read I felt I could see, now that I knew that she was dying of AIDS, how, cornered, she had both found her mind and lost it in the terror of her approaching end.
They say that in the old war at the beginning of the century men going up to the front found their best friends at the last moment, just as Betty and I found each other.
‘Hush now, Dora,’ I said, going back to her body and stroking her cheek, ‘hush, rest now.’
There was a knock on the door and Wiecienski opened it. A voice said: ‘Sergeant Stevenson.’
I led him across to where the others stood by the body.
He looked down at her and said: ‘Suarez?’
I said: ‘Yes.’ I said: ‘You’re a mate of mine and I just wanted you to look at her, as you’re here.’
He stood looking down at her; he didn’t say anything.
I bent down and pulled out a small, icy box from under the trolley wheels that had accompanied the body. Without opening it, but placing my hand on it, I said to Stevenson: ‘In this box there is a part of Suarez’s left breast and most of her right arm. But I have forgotten that she is not complete; to me she is complete, and I am going to catch this man. The world isn’t big enough for him to escape me.’
Stevenson said: ‘It depends, but I think we might – you know I’m on this Roatta thing.’
I said: ‘Yes, let’s talk about it when we leave here.’
He said: ‘I came over here because I wanted to be sure of catching you.’
I said: ‘Yes, all right.’
‘Let’s get off back to the Factory when you’re ready,’ said Stevenson, ‘and have a talk – see if we can’t connect up a few things. Might be nothing in it, but you see how the times click, and villains have wheels. I see no reason yet why he mightn’t have carried straight on after Carstairs and Suarez and done Roatta, do you?’
‘I’m glad to hear you say it,’ I said, ‘becau
se it’s what I think of as a possible, too, if we could find a link that tied Suarez and Roatta together. The old lady’s not a problem – for me she was killed because she butted in at the wrong moment and saw too much. Anyway it’s a starting point.’ I added: ‘Also I’ve got the press on it. Cryer.’
‘Yes, why not stir the sauce,’ said Stevenson, ‘certainly. Villains and maniacs buy a newspaper same as the next man.’ He added: ‘Not that that makes them human.’
Wiecienski shuddered in the cold room. Without looking at anyone, he said: ‘Get him.’
I suddenly wanted to be back to the Factory. I looked at the time; it was ten to one in the morning, but I wasn’t tired. I said to Lansdown: ‘We’ve got to leave. Thanks very much. We’ve learned a lot.’ I thought, ‘So she had terminal AIDS.’ It was all I could think about. So that was at least one of the things she could never tell Betty Carstairs – but talking to Lansdown, I tried to sound as if I were just talking about the weather.
Lansdown was saying: ‘I’ll keep you fully in touch.’
‘Yes, thank you,’ I said. ‘One thing – if you could try and let me know when the funeral is.’
‘Carstairs will probably be buried next Saturday,’ Lansdown said. ‘With public funerals it’s usually on a Saturday afternoon – but Suarez is going to take longer, depending on the Westminster, our report, the coroner, yourselves.’ He said to Wiecienski: ‘You can take her back now, Andrew.’
Wiecienski said: ‘I’ll take care of her,’ and he drew the towel over her.
Time put a dead little question into a silence that fell as he did so, marred only by the squeak of the rubber wheels; and then the full horror of Suarez’s death must have struck all of us in that high room smoking with ice simultaneously, because we all turned and looked at each other, speechless, and Wiecienski looked back at us over his shoulder once with red eyes as he took her back.
Stevenson had been dropped off at the morgue by a passing squad car, so to get back to the Factory we took my Ford, and to take my mind off Carstairs/Suarez for a few minutes, I started talking to him about my recall to A14 – I was glad to have a straight man to talk to. I said: ‘It was surprising; the Voice rang me, and I was told what I’d never been told at the time of the internal enquiry over the Mardy case – that the decision of the disciplinary board was that I be suspended from the police force, you know, the door shut but not locked, so that you stand around with your head under your arm until they suddenly come on the line and say you can have your head back on your shoulders again now if you want, we’ve a job for you and you’re reinstated, only don’t fuck us about this time. Yes, well, then I see Jollo, and when I’ve got him tuned in, it turns out they’ve no one over at A14 to put on Carstairs/Suarez, you being busy over Roatta. I said, you can’t just fire and rehire people like that and they said why not, you like police work don’t you and I said yes. Then they reminded me that I was a very dedicated officer, which I had been in danger of forgetting, and Jollo and the Voice started up again with their dreary old music – why is it we all hate you so much at times, Sergeant, why are you always a loner, always so fucking difficult. The only way I can solve my cases is by being myself, I said – I don’t think they got it, though. Jollo said, your tongue’s too sharp, why don’t you try keeping it in your pocket? It would cut the pocket, I said, I’d rather nail a villain with it. And it’s true I’m a loner, I added, though I’ve one or two mates – but that’s because I don’t want a whole load of zealous cunts looking for promotion tumbling all over me when I’m on a matter. You know me, Stevenson, I always warn them first, like politely – nothing at all today, thanks, fuck off, always leave me alone when I’m working – because that way I can hear a murderer, feel him, hunt him my own way; that’s what I’m made to do. You’re really too old to stay a sergeant, you know, Jollo said, you’re forty-five. I said, if you kick me upstairs, I go straight out at the front door again – that’s final and I want a divorce, as they say on page three of the linens, so why don’t you just let me get on with it? Because if everyone behaved the way you do, Jollo said, what kind of a police force would we have? Why not reverse the question, I said, and try answering that one? After all, I said to them, look at my private life. That’s quickly and easily done – it’s me. What I had going for me on the family front before, well, that blew itself to bits, as you well know, and it’s not because you’re a loner that you’re a bad detective; besides, the hours of work don’t bother me at all, and that’s all I think you need to understand, Mr Jollo. I told him well, look, anyway, you know me – if you put me onto these two women’s deaths they’ll become the whole human race for me till I catch the individual, and I will. I’m always the same; I’m always on the side of the victim; I never change. But if you give me a case, Mr Jollo, it’s my case and nobody else’s. It’s my nature; it’s like putting a mongoose to a snake. All right, all right, Jollo said, just get on with Carstairs/Suarez, and I said, that’s what I’m patiently waiting to do when you’ve finished talking. So then afterwards the Voice, which had been told of this conversation with Jollo, rang me and said I had this really lyrical side to my nature and I said there’s nothing very lyrical about an A14 death.
I Was Dora Suarez Page 10