'I don't know.'
He stood up. 'It's time for your doctor. Come on – I'll walk you to the corner.'
She hesitated, greed and caution pulling opposite ways. 'Where did you say you met Big Mary?'
'Through a friend of mine – Mr Kujavia.'
'Kujavia?' A squeal of rage and disbelief harshened by a raw edge of fear. The squeal hung in the air between them. It was as much his as hers. It burst and echoed inside his head. 'Ya lyin' messan!' One of the two men at the bar had moved to the door; if he tried to leave, he would be caught between them. The barman had come to the end of the counter and, raising the flap, was standing in the opening dabbing at a pint glass with a grey cloth.
After that move into position, everyone waited. All his life Murray had found a release in fighting. He had sometimes been hurt but he had never been afraid. In this endless moment of waiting that was changed. He could not afford to take a blow on the head. It was a knowledge that came without calculation; an instinct of the body. And with it came the fear of dying.
He rose to his feet and moved quietly to the door, stopping where he could see all three of the men. He spoke to the one who was blocking the door.
'You're a good guesser. I've got mates out there on surveillance. You were clocked coming in. If I don't leave here in one piece, you're in a lot of trouble, friend.'
His tone was low and reasonable. There was no threat in it, but rather an undertone of amusement. In the face of his certainty, the man began to move away from the door and then changed his mind and swung round to check the street.
He's a mug, Murray thought, but not enough of a mug to believe me. He knew his best chance would be to make a rush while the man's back was to him, but he could not decide to move. It would only take a moment to check the windows opposite, look for a parked vehicle – some sign of a police presence. Guardian angels.
The man turned abruptly and as Murray braced himself came close. But he was grinning. 'Aye,' he said with contempt, 'you weren't kidding. You've got a right mate out there,' and with a nudge of the shoulder he walked past. In a moment, the alteration was complete. Two men stood drinking quietly, the barman behind his counter reached to fix a bottle on the gantry. A woman slouched at a table staring disappointed into an empty glass.
As Murray went out, he pushed awkwardly at the swing doors and the left one came back striking him on the arm. A big man with a full head of hair and a great jutting beard flecked with white was crossing the pavement to the entrance. As staring he broke step, Murray recognised him. The guy who talked so well, Billy Shanks' friend... Tommy Beltane.
The Prophet.
'I've just promoted you,' Murray said, 'to guardian angel.'
16 A Short History of
Prostitution
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 15TH 1988
'The Romans did their whoring differently,' Tommy Beltane said. 'Like everything they touched they made it sinister and grotesque. The whores of Rome, the bustuariae, believed, were persuaded to believe, they were the servants of the Gods of the Dead. They practised their trade in the great cemeteries of Rome and received their lovers lying in the graves which had not yet been filled in.'
‘I met one like that back there,' Murray said. 'She looked as if she might have been buried and dug up.'
Wondering how he would take that, Murray glanced at the man by his side. A big man with the appearance of a painted patriarch on the ceiling of an Italian cathedral. People probably turned in the street trying to guess who he was. Nobody. A clerk who worked for the Region, Tommy Beltane, who after the briefest of hesitations had attached himself to Murray outside the Crusader by some attraction of opposites.
'Billy Shanks is,' Beltane pronounced on the full organ note of an actor of the old school, 'a good man but not a brave one.' They hovered on the edge of the pavement and crossed quickly as a break carne in the traffic. 'Do you know he hasn't printed a tip from me in weeks? Months? Never libel the rich in this country. As if that bastard Heathers had any reputation among decent men outside the fictions of a courtroom. Even the costs were phenomenal, apparently – and the paper was ordered to pay both sides. God knows why they didn't settle out of court as usual – an expensive rush of principles to the head. You do know about the case?'
Murray nodded.
'I just remembered that you'd not have been here when it happened. You were abroad, weren't you?'
Automatically, Murray accounted to himself for Beltane's embarrassment, it was not at showing he had discussed Murray with Billy Shanks; or because he imagined that Murray had anything to hide about those years away; but simply that for him the idea of choosing to be away from the city at all was a shade disgraceful. For Beltane, Murray suspected, nothing outside this city was quite real.
'Despite all that, you still give him the odd tip,' Murray said, strolling forward at the big man's side in the warm sun, 'even if he hasn't the guts to use it?'
Beltane shook his head. 'I'm not criticising him – well, of course, I am. People like Billy should have virtue in the Roman sense. They should have a care for the state.' He stopped abruptly to declaim, ' "One on God's side is a majority!" ' ignoring the passersby, who in the way of the city made it a point of pride to try to return the compliment. 'Marvellous, eh? But it wasn't a journalist who said that.'
'No,' Murray said, glancing at him from the corner of his eye, 'they wouldn't be brave enough. I can see that.'
'Oh-oh!' Beltane responded and started forward once more, without adding to his double note of disquiet.
'Were you expecting to meet anyone in particular in the Crusader?' Murray wondered.
'Not necessarily.'
'You were dropping in on the chance of getting a bit of good conversation. Someone interested in Roman history, or politics, or something like that.'
'It's not quite the same class of people as come into the Shot,' Beltane said calmly. 'Although I might have met you. What took you there?'
'I was looking for a woman called Mary O'Bannion.' An unevenness of the pavement made Beltane miss his step. Recovering, he asked, 'A professional secret? I don't suppose you would tell me why.'
'Not because I'm a man with a weapon,' Murray said. 'That's how the whore back there called it – he hits her, she hits him.'
But although Beltane made a grimace of disgust, he said nothing.
'I had a spell in hospital,' Murray went on. 'It gave me time to think. Putting one or two things together, I decided that Blair Heathers might occasionally use a frightener. A man with a foreign accent who frightened people in the worst possible way. And something else I'd been told made me wonder if he might be running a stable of girls. Then I looked for a name to fit.'
'Kujavia, Billy Shanks gave you it.'
'Not necessarily,' Murray said in his turn.
Beltane pointed down the side street they were crossing. 'Deacon Street. Where they found the first body. One of these charming ladies might be Jill – She Who Rips.' He bowed generally, and a woman with her hair in curlers gave a flustered grin.
'When you've visited the Crusader, have you ever come across Mary O'Bannion?'
'A whore.' Beltane filled his mouth with the word, made from it an orotund song. 'An old fat whore. A very fat smelly whore. She lives with Kujavia – so I've heard. You were right about that.'
They crossed Moirhill Road and turned into Baird Drive, climbing the steep hill towards the public park.
'Below, that's the kingdom of the whore master,' Beltane said. 'Deacon Street, Florence Street – all round there. Those letters that have been coming to Billy's newspaper signed Jill are from that kingdom. Jack the Ripper had a passport for it a hundred years ago. He was a client gone wrong – like the Yorkshire Ripper, Sutcliffe. Why shouldn't our Jill be returning the compliment? A whore who hated customers, police, pimps – hated men. It's always seemed to me whores must be full of hate – down there in the dark kingdom.'
An image came to Murray of Frances Fernie, sitting on the edge of
a bed watching without protest as he threw her possessions on to the floor. 'Prostitutes aren't like that,' he said.
They were walking now in the shade cast by the line of beech trees on the other side of the railings.
'Who can be sure what they're like?' Beltane asked. 'Even the patron saint of repentant prostitutes wasn't a prostitute at all. Saint Lucia – she was tortured and killed by the Romans for being a Christian. Whether she was or not, her boyfriend denounced her to the authorities because she wouldn't go to bed with him. The earliest recorded martyr of the permissive society.'
'I'll let you be the expert on the subject.'
In response, Beltane made a gesture of scooping at the back of his hand with a fingernail. 'I wouldn't like to give you anything you could use against me,' he said. 'You could make a man very sorry if he ever confided a weakness to you.' He made the dabbing gesture again on the back of his hand. 'You're a scab picker.'
They turned into the park. The attack had taken Murray by surprise. It was not a description of himself he recognised. Underfoot, the grass, barbered close, was waiting for autumn and rain to recover its fresh greenness after the summer crowds.
'If we go up round this way,' Beltane said, 'there's a bandstand at the top. It's sheltered and catches the sun.'
'You know around here well.'
'As a child I played in this park.'
'You – Billy – Eddy Stewart – Blair Heathers – did everyone in this town manage to get themselves born in Moirhill?'
'Oh, not in Moirhill!' Beltane, taken by surprise, sounded prim and conventionally shocked. He pointed ahead. 'We stayed over on the other side.'
'Where the rich people live.'
'Hardly rich. Bungalow land.' A woman on the path ahead of them knelt and took three dogs off the leash. Yapping, the smallest, a chow, pursued a Borzoi and an old leisurely Labrador across the grass. 'I hate dogs,' Beltane said suddenly. 'Droppings that blind children. Sins of the mothers in this case. Middle-class dog fondlers.' His breath came harder as they climbed and his sentences shorter. 'That bloody fool Columbus importing syphilis. Took the fun out of things for four and a half centuries. What put it back? Not the pill, that's surface stuff. Deep grammar of it – a shot of penicillin in the bum. That's what made the permissive society. Even so – we can't get that fifteenth-century innocence back.'
'Do you have Mary O'Bannion's address?' Murray asked. 'I'm not interested in how you got it.'
As if he hadn't heard the interruption, Beltane went on, 'Think of rabbits and myxomatosis.'
'Rabbits?' Murray asked despite himself.
'Healthier than ever. Bounding about, the size of terriers. So there's always a worry. Locomotor ataxia is a terrible affliction. Gogarty's joke about the syphilitic sprat with delusions of grandeur – thought it was a salmon. The ingenuity of the malevolent spirochaete. And now bloody Aids – Venus is a fearful goddess.' They had arrived at the summit of the park. Below, ahead of them, a neat grid of bungalows stretched to where high flats like exclamation marks punctuated the middle distance. The roof of the bandstand was in process of caving in; but as they walked round it they came on a bench placed where a side wall gathered the sun's warmth. Seated on it, they looked back the way they had come, a vista of chimneys and slate roofs, among which were deceptively open places that might have been gardens but were only the rubbled lots left behind when the old tenements had been torn down.
'At this distance, on a day of clear light, it looks handsome,' Beltane said. His breathing had settled and he leaned his hands on his knees contemplatively. 'Those old masons who cut the blocks of red sandstone or white were craftsmen who knew what they were about.'
'If you did give me her address, that would be it. Nobody would know where I'd got it.' As he said this, it occurred to Murray that it wasn't necessarily true, since the man in the Crusader had seen them going off together perhaps. It wasn't a thought he felt he had to share with Beltane.
'It's nice in the sun here.'
'I can sit in the sun anywhere.'
'It comes back to being brave again, doesn't it?' Everything Beltane said in that deep resonant tone sounded well. 'Twenty years ago Mary O'Bannion was Kujavia's alibi for murder.'
One of the things that Murray had learned was that when people broke certain silences about the past it was for their own reasons; the wrong question could stop them in their tracks. He waited and said nothing.
'He beat one of his women to death with an iron bar. He'd used it on her before – as well as on the others. But this time he went too far. When he stopped, she was dead.' He gave Murray a strange glance. It was as if he was ashamed. 'Can you conceive a man who beats women with an iron bar? You'd think he would kill everyone he touched. I can't imagine it. But they say it was only that one who died.'
'She was someone you knew.' Murray offered it quietly, as if confirming something obvious.
'Can you imagine even beating a woman with your fists? It'll be easier for you. You're a violent man. I didn't have to be told that about you. I've always avoided violence, that's possible even in this city. Yet for all these years in between I haven't been able to help myself from thinking about that iron bar. Beating down, beating down...'
'What happened to Kujavia?'
'Nothing. I told you – he had an alibi. He wasn't arrested. He didn't even get his name in the papers. But the girl was dead.'
'I don't see how you can know it was Kujavia who did it.' Beltane stared blankly, not understanding.
'The girl was dead,' Murray said. 'Kujavia was never accused. I don't imagine he confessed to you. How do you know he killed her?'
'I waited for something to happen,' Beltane said. From beyond the trees, Murray could hear the chow yap itself into hysteria like a toy that has been too tightly wound. 'I couldn't believe there wouldn't be justice, God's or man's. I waited for him to go to jail or be run over by a bus. When it was almost too much for me, Billy Shanks sat me in a car one day and said, "That's him". And this ugly little man walked past. It didn't seem real – that he was the man. You read about things, see them on a screen... Only what you feel in your own flesh is real.'
When it seemed as if he wouldn't speak again, Murray took the risk and asked, 'She meant something special to you?' It was a question, but the tone was so mild, almost uninterested, that he made it sound as though the answer was a knowledge they already shared.
'I was twenty-four years old and I had never been to bed with a woman. There were a lot of us like that back there in pre-history. I was walking through the city centre – going home to Mother – and I saw this girl standing under the light of a corner. She was too skinny for anybody to be afraid of her. Even at a distance she looked hungry. I knew what she was. We went down a flight of steps into a basement area. She wanted me to wear a sheath – as if I would have had one. She said something about the other women letting her stand there. I thought, It's her very first night! I got it into my head she'd run away from home or maybe from some kind of institution. The light slanted down through the railings on to her face and there was a bruise round her eye. I asked her what had happened and she said, A man gave me it. Who else but a man? She had such a strange expression – a wince, a sneer, a poor sort of bravado. I took her up against the wall. She was so light and thin but I drove into her with all my strength. I wanted to split her in two. It was the most terrible excitement of my life.' He turned his head and his eyes swam back from the lost distance. 'I know what you must be thinking. How much that must make you despise me.'
'You're not the first man to get it up against a wall,' Murray said.
'Once a policeman, always a policeman. I'll tell you something that will make you think worse of me still. I saw her again. As often as I could find her. She was an obsession. That went on for a year almost, until... '
'Until she got herself killed. She was the one Kujavia beat to death.'
'Oh, no,' Beltane said, as if it should have been obvious. 'She – the girl I was obsessed with
– was Mary O'Bannion. The woman who was killed was older. She was quite different – she came from Belgium. She had children. It was even said the trouble might have started over the children – Kujavia interfering with one of them. But they were very young.'
'It was Mary O'Bannion who told you all of this?'
Beltane's face contorted. Later Murray would think the face of the girl in the basement must have looked like that, a wincing bravado. If you glanced away from him, however, the resonant hypnotic note was there just the same as before. 'I have no doubt all whores hate their customers in their hearts. It's perfectly possible, of course, that some of them don't realise. The golden hearted ones. It would be better for them not to realise.'
'You've known all these years that Kujavia killed the girl. But if Mary O'Bannion gave him an alibi, then Mary O'Bannion could take it away.'
'Did you know that Billy Shanks was a kind man?' Beltane wondered softly. 'He came across me while he was checking up on Mary – Mary O'Bannion. He was starting out as a reporter, only at the beginning of his career. He wasn't any older than I was, but he helped me. I didn't understand things then.'
'So you found out?'
'About myself.' Beltane stood up. He moved away so quickly that Murray had to hurry, catching the first words as they drifted back to him. 'Now I sit on my arse shuffling papers for the Region. All nonsense. A nonsense life. As if you bought a ticket for a journey and boarded the wrong ship by mistake. If a young man came to me, I'd tell him to be a doctor – or an engineer – anything that will stick your nose in the world. Don't shuffle papers – better than that, do anything. Bone a carcass. Chine a loin of lamb. Get blood on your elbows. At least you'll learn how a man is made.'
The lady and her dogs had gone home. Afternoon shadows slanted across the grass.
Approaching the gates of the park, after a long silence, Beltane stopped abruptly. 'Maybe it's time,' he said, but so quietly Murray wasn't sure of what he heard. He watched as Beltane pulled out a thin pocket diary, and turning to the back scribbled three or four lines. 'That's what you wanted.' He tore out the page and started towards the gate.
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