‘You never go indoors with Dan, do you, Tom?’
‘Nope. He never asks me. He lives down this end. Doesn’t take me there.’
‘Well, if he asks you in, don’t go, will you?’
He looked up in surprise. ‘Daniel’s a bit dirty, Mummy. He’s all right, but I wouldn’t want to go.’
Don’t want to go. Pip had not wanted to go the evening before. Kim thought of that as they climbed the steps up to the flat, she irritated as ever by the lack of light, still unsure after a day’s thought whether Pip’s not wanting to leave after another cup of tea gave her a feeling of warmth, or whether the memory of that proprietorial hand round her shoulder made her cold. Let’s face it, Kim, she told herself later, when Tom had yawned peacefully to bed halfway through a video and well beyond another battle over homework, let’s face the fact that you could do very well with Mr Carlton. You’ll soon be a qualified pharmacist, only another month until you can register, but no hope in hell of ever getting a shop of your own. Play your cards right and good old Pip would help you. All you’d have to do is love him a bit. Carry on where the wife left off, be looked after, Tom too. Do a bit of looking after herself, and go to bed with him, of course. There she stopped and sighed, pulled her dressing gown around herself defensively, huddled back into the depths of the second-hand sofa and remembered how futile it was to dwell for a minute on what Pip could provide. No use whatever her thinking she could even begin to string along some man she did not fancy, and the merest touch of Pip was enough to show her that however much she admired him for all that industry and enthusiasm, sex, God forbid, was another matter. She’d rather Duncan. And come to think of it, she’d not liked Pip shouting at Duncan, telling him to shove off. She could say what she liked – she could scream like a fishwife; Duncan was still her husband – but if anyone else interfered, even on her behalf, she resented the insult. ‘No, my girl,’ she grumbled to the electric fire, a thing of such ineffective ugliness she despised it along with all her lousy furniture, ‘there aren’t any easy ways. Wouldn’t mind a bloody good cuddle, but not Pip. Ugh.’ The thought chilled her. She got up to go to bed, late. Bed had been her destination more than an hour ago; the lights were out apart from the artificial glow of the fire, invisible outside, but all decisions to move had postponed themselves. The parade, visible from the living-room window, was lit but silent apart from one passing car a minute: behind her, on to the service road downstairs from the kitchen door, a stillness she could feel through the walls, punctuated by that scrabbling sound, only now beginning to register on a mind blurred by fatigue. A scratching at the window, then at the door, nothing visible shadowed through the glass or the net curtain. Kim stood between kitchen and living-room, paralysed, listening, gazing at the handle of the kitchen door fixedly, almost willing it to move, imagining it did. If Tom stared long enough at a clock, he could see the hands move. Now her own eyes took in no more than a fraction of play on the door handle, a soft, scraping sound outside, insistent, audible with straining effort, undetectable to a careless ear, a background to her thoughts, she now remembered, for five minutes or more. She was suddenly cold; then hot in a damp sweat of fear which cooled into a trembling. Each of her hands gripped the opposite forearm, fingers digging deep into her own skin to still herself, injecting pain enough to control the desire to shout.
‘Duncan! Is that you? Well, fuck off.’ The silence was ominous; into it crept the continued sound of the creeping scrape, no footsteps. The handle of the door was still.
‘Duncan, don’t be silly. I’m giving you ten seconds to go. One, two … or I’ll call your boss … three, four …’
She spoke loudly enough for him to hear, softly enough not to waken the boy, spitting the numbers out of her mouth clearly and very slowly, as much as anything to calm herself, stop herself screaming her message. Then she walked towards the light switch, flicked it, opened the back door with a violent fling.
There was nothing, a big blank space of nothing. Silence, no car, no light other than her own streaming into the darkness. The pitted site beyond, a crane punctuating the horizon.
‘Duncan?’ she called again. Then, more doubtfully, ‘Daniel?’
Still silence, but drifting around the concrete balcony, scraping against the rough surface, a white polythene bag, glowing in the light, fluttering in the breeze which had wafted it upwards from the rubbish in the dirty road, moving around like a live thing, frisking in the tunnel the balcony formed. No one hung washing here: the dirt defeated everything. Kim slumped against the doorway, dizzy with relief. A bag, a bloody bag, rustling. Moving the door handle, no, there had not really been any movement. Only a bag in a breeze. She closed the door, wanting to believe what she had cause to believe, put her hands over her ears, in case she might hear footsteps.
Bailey parked his car at one end of the grim service road, feeling a little sheepish and wondering what he would say if some police car, not from his own station, should ask what he was doing loitering in these parts. Looking for what, sir? A bit of nice Asian tart, sir? You’re on the wrong side for the posh Chinese restaurant, sir. No, no, of course not, but what would he say? I’m out looking for a rogue copper, don’t make me laugh. He did not doubt he would cope with such questions and also that he would be able to avoid them. The number of patrol cars was pathetically small, and the service road less threatening than it seemed. Unlike Tombo, large bins, nooks and crannies held few fears for Bailey. He seemed to have developed a sixth sense, like a heat-seeking missile, for the dangerous presence of human warmth; a sense which would send him, with apparent aimlessness to the other side of the street, avoiding the corner glowing with malevolence. Bailey had several scars, kneecaps, elbows, the back of the skull, the ribs and the psyche, knew very well how to fight and what it was like to lose control. Which was precisely why he preferred to avoid the conflict. The same knowledge influenced his dealings with Duncan, younger than himself by more than fifteen summers; at the age when he could not have been taught anything either, would always have known best. There had been no point then, in some wiser, older sergeant saying, wouldn’t do that if I were you, or I should give up while the going’s good, boy; or, when a woman’s left, she’s gone, old son, find another. He knew he would not have listened then any more than Duncan would listen now. They had spoken at length, the two of them, Duncan attentive to the warnings, the advice to woo and accept his wife if he wanted her back, taking it in like a balm on the skin, not really listening at all, the same obsessive jealousy as much in evidence at the end as it had been at the beginning, determined to go back. Two pints and more hypocrisy, Bailey well aware that he was saying, do as you should, but not as I did. Duncan was not murderous, Bailey decided; but as an officer capable of conspicuous bravery and equally conspicuous drinking, a man with a mission, little reflective sense and no other humanising influences than a one-time wife, he was possibly dangerous and certainly a nuisance. Duncan’s problem was, in part, having nowhere else to go and nothing else to do but haunt his woman and embarrass everyone. Duncan came from the same streets as most of those he arrested; they did not read books. He needed the blunt approach of being found in the act and stopped like a criminal.
Which was why Bailey was walking down this road in his brothel-creeping shoes, soundless and almost invisible. The wind whipped rubbish in his face, the detritus of neglect and a neighbourhood of which few were proud. There was another cause for concern in his active mind, another cause for feeling ever so faintly hypocritical. All that stuff he said to Helen about never interfering, let be what will be, let people find out for themselves and don’t sweat if you can’t help. Load of rot, in view of what he was doing. He might have said, I am paid by the Commissioner to keep my men working, but he doubted the Commissioner expected this. Out at midnight, catching an obsessive husband who happened to be a policeman, in the hope of confronting him with his own stupidity, making him ashamed to be no better than a slightly ridiculous prowler.
Baile
y ducked behind one of the enormous bins, an instinct, nothing more, squinting towards the door and the stairs where he had never been, the exact location deduced from inspecting the front of Herringbone Parade. Kimberley Perry’s flat, almost like all the other ugly flats. Next door to the chemist’s flat, so close an agile man could cross from one cumbersome concrete balcony to the next. A car parked, without lights, next to the chemist, not Duncan’s damaged car: a man walking away round the corner, an energetic walk, no skulking to it, no conscience either. Duncan, he thought, without being sure. Anyone really, but a windcheater like Duncan’s, Duncan’s brisk walk which Bailey had seen him maintain, drunk or sober. More silence. The figure rounded the corner, disappeared. Then Bailey heard the moaning.
‘No, no, no. Too much … he did. Help me, uncle …’
The sound of it was borne to him on the wind, a hopeless sound of one human being not in agony but in extremis. He followed the pathetic half weeping from where he stood, into an alcove which formed an entrance to the yard behind a fruit and vegetable shop. Bailey could tell roughly which shop by the smell of vegetable, something reminiscent of a market stall after hours, or a school kitchen, a dead leaf smell, sweet rather than rotten. Mixed, as he bent over him, with the smell of this figure sitting with his head on his crossed arms, over one raised knee, the other leg lying as if he had already abandoned part of himself. The head, when Bailey placed one hand under the chin to raise it gently, was that of an old man, the indeterminate age only betrayed by the thick, lank hair. There was no protest against such summary handling: the breath snorting from the mouth was full of decay. Bailey squatted by his side.
‘What’s the matter, lad? Not well?’
‘Oh God, oh God, oh God. Him, he hit me. Hit me. Gave me the wrong stuff, too much. Oh God. Don’t know why. Him and his back room. Saw him come back.’
Bailey did not know what he was talking about in this gasping mumble of words, asked because it seemed what the man wanted.
‘Who hit you? Who came back?’ He could see eyes, glittering.
‘Him. I saw him. Doesn’t matter now. Help me.’
There were rules in a dozen police manuals about dealing with vagrants, drug addicts, filthy specimens in poor conditions. No artificial respiration without a tube, call for ambulance and only handle with rubber gloves, carefully. They scratch, they bite, they infect with Aids, hepatitis, they must never go inside a car which is not equipped. Bailey knew the rules: he had taught them. He embraced the man, warmed him for a minute, shocked to find thin cotton clothes with only a raggy sweater for warmth, spoke carefully into his ear.
‘Wait here for a minute.’ One claw-like hand clutched his coat. He detached it gently, ran down to the end of the service road where his car was surreptitiously parked and drove back level with the man. He picked him up, and fed him gently into the back seat of the car, a manoeuvre that took minutes since the body was heavy. Saliva fell from the open mouth on to Bailey’s coat: as he put one hand over the head to protect the man’s skull from the lintel of the car, he felt on the back a swelling beneath the sticky hair. Bailey could have knocked on a door, run for a phone, taken a number of other options which would avoid the future embarrassment of explaining his own errand in this godforsaken service road, but none of them crossed his mind. For someone needing a hospital, this was simply the quickest way. But in shutting the door, and driving away by the swiftest route to the nearest casualty, Bailey sensed he was already too late. There was a rattle in the throat of the man behind, and he fell over in the back seat, covered by Bailey’s coat, his face pallid, profoundly unconscious, the car’s warmth scented with death.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘TRA la la, fiddly di dee, what a mess. The breath of life is the stuff of life, so it is. Without which one becomes a stiff who doesn’t give a stuff. One forgets how much fun this was, a lifetime of drugs. Don’t breathe now, there’s a good boy. What a jolly time we’re having here, Hazel, my dear. Tinkering, and being paid. Avoiding temptation, of course. Never did like the smell of this stuff, but ether, well ether was different.’
Sean Hazel turned away from the bench where he worked and took a deep breath, then fished in his pockets for a cigarette on the right side and the small hip flask of brandy on the left. Withdrawing both hands simultaneously, he regarded the contents with puzzlement, unsure which to broach first, weighing the pleasure of one against the other. He put both down, easily distracted, picked up instead a copy of Playboy from the opposite bench, a magazine absorbed with relentless enthusiasm by the lab technician who did not care who knew what he read. Flicking over the pages, Hazel was puzzled and alarmed by the dimensions of the women in the photos. ‘Glory be to God,’ he muttered to himself. ‘They’d eat you alive.’ And he wondered vaguely about the lab technician’s preferences. Behind him, there was the steady sound of disembodied breathing, eerie in the emptiness.
He sat far away from the bench on which he had rigged an automatic ventilator, a device which mimicked human breathing, pulled paper and pen towards him, then wrote in his indecipherable hand, dictating to himself as he went, ‘This is what I did last night. First I folded an ordinary, large, yellow duster in various ways and poured chloroform on it, just to see how much it would hold. About fifty milligrammes at best, if the duster was soaking not dripping, but difficult to handle. Holding the duster over my own face, I breathed it as long as I could, but within a few minutes, while I was feeling dizzy and sick, the whole of the chloroform had evaporated. A heavyish concentration like this is rather unpleasant, and if the drug was being used for frivolous purposes, pleasure in other words, I doubt anyone would use that much. It might, however, have been sufficient to knock out a small woman, though not enough to keep her knocked out for more than a minute or two. Chloroform is many times heavier than air; much of it is wasted by falling around the face … Oh God,’ he interrupted himself, ‘even I find this complicated to explain. Now what the hell did I do next? Ah yes.’ He walked three steps to the left, two to the right, counting.
‘I took a sample of my own blood and had that lab technician test it today. Barely a hint of chloroform, a mere milligramme. And I certainly didn’t feel randy, but I suppose that depends on the company.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘So you don’t get anything like twelve milligrammes aboard even by the most determined sniffing, and since it evaporates so quick, you’d never get that much from one duster full, not ever.’ He began to pace round the room, continuing his lecture. ‘In fact, it occurs to me that it would take about twenty minutes’ solid inhaling to get that much aboard, you just couldn’t be faster. But looking at the books, old boy, and all the recorded levels, the average person would be out for the count, temporarily, that is, after five minutes inhaling a concentration like this, and five minutes was roughly how long the old anaesthetist would take to put them in the land of nod, holding them down too. Now, Miss West, and Mr Red Pig, how the hell did this woman take in the rest? Self-administered whilst already unconscious? Novel, but not possible. She could only take in twelve milligrammes if someone held the same duster over her face while she was unconscious, then poured on to it another fifty milligrammes, and then another … Whoever did this held the chloroform vehicle above the face and away from the skin, no burns, no contact with the mouth, you see …’ He turned back to the lung machine, breathing with the sound of a regular heartbeat. He wished the sound of breathing had been as reliable in every patient he had put to sleep, but this was simply a machine, pushing air in and out. ‘No heart, my dear,’ he said, patting it. ‘No anxieties, no lungs affected by a lifetime’s fagends, etcetera, etcetera. But in a little while, I shall measure, if I’m sober enough, the levels of chloroform round this mouth which has been breathing in this stuff for a quarter of an hour … Then I’ll think of a way to put into words what that bugger did …’
He looked at his watch, turned off the ventilator. The whole thing would be done again tomorrow. Over the mouth of the machine he had placed the mask,
a souvenir from former times, the conventional anaesthetic mask. Covered in gauze, to be soaked with chloroform or ether, different thicknesses of gauze for each. He remembered; he remembered well. The Schimmelbusch mask was the one he liked most. An oval of thick wire with crossed struts and a rim to catch liquid. The one that looked like a helmet. Hazel sighed. He had last used this in the war with bombs falling around him. Buried bombs, memories and now disinterred ideas.
‘Helen? Sorry to wake you, but …’
‘What time is it?’ Bailey always knew the time, as if a clock was placed at the back of his eyes.
‘Only two in the morning. Not very civilised, but …’
‘Are you all right? You’re not hurt, are you?’
There were times when he loved her particularly, for making the obvious enquiry and failing to be annoyed. For sounding asleep, like a person talking from the far end of a tunnel, but responding without impatience.
‘No, I’m fine. It could wait until morning.’
‘No, it could not, or you wouldn’t have rung now, would you? What is it?’
‘Oh, nothing.’ Self-deprecation, an automatic downgrading of emotion was a feeling they both shared, and one she understood perfectly.
‘Nothing … but I went to that street, you know, Herringbone whatever. Where your chemist lives. To look for the sergeant who’s mentioned in your report, just to see if I might forestall his arrest for loitering round after his wife, make a fool of him before a dozen others tried it. But I found a man instead. Dying, I think, drug overdose.’
‘So you picked him up, I suppose?’ Helen asked, knowing this was exactly what Bailey would have done. ‘Blew your cover?’
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