Ripped

by Frederic Lindsay

  Loudly then, Murray began to talk about television. He had no set and so he had to talk about what he had seen in the States. Once started, he couldn't stop; and heard himself, under Peerse's ironical gaze, describe chat shows, baseball, American football, a documentary about a deaf girl that had stuck in his memory. He carried the conversation like a burden until the old lady pushed into a brief silence to ask Peerse, 'Would you like to have more tea now? Or coffee instead? Malcolm always has coffee.'

  After these Sunday meals, it was the custom for Murray to make a second pot of tea for Mother and himself and coffee for Irene and Malcolm. He avoided her eye until reluctantly she rose and went into the kitchen.

  'You don't want more coffee,' he said to Peerse. 'You've remembered an appointment.'

  Malcolm leaned across the table towards Peerse. 'I don't know why you won't believe me,' he said. 'I was with her all night. I wish I'd never seen her, never been near the place, but I was and that's the truth. She didn't have anything to do with this terrible thing. Can't you accept that, and leave me alone?'

  'Does your wife accept it?' Peerse wondered, staring not at him but at Irene. 'It doesn't bother her at all, where you were?'

  'It's because they believe in relationships,' Murray said as the tray with the pot of tea and coffee cups was set on the table. 'It's only policemen who have dirty minds.'

  'In my house,' Mother said, fixing her pale gaze on her elder son, 'I expect people not to mumble.'

  'I was saying it was a pity Mr Peerse – Ian – has to go.'

  'But he hasn't had his coffee. He has to go?'

  Peerse shrugged. 'Yes, yes. Thank you for the meal. I enjoyed myself, Mrs Wilson.'

  As Peerse got up, Murray rose with him. With the relief of it being over, he was suddenly gripped by the anger he had been restraining. Unexpressed, however, it was like a poison exhausting him.

  It was in this slack off-guard moment he heard Mother say, 'That man who gave the woman the alibi, I wouldn't be surprised if the two of them were in it together. I was thinking about it while I was making the tea.' Again, adding to Murray's disorientation, the pleasure of this involvement had altered the expression of her face, like an echo of a memory out of his childhood. 'And that solves it, you see, because they'll have done the murder together. I don't know why you didn't think of that.'

  He had been only a child and they had been standing on a bridge across a river. Had it really been a river, or was that a child's memory making everything larger than it had been; perhaps it had been nothing wider than a burn, and the bridge made of wood with a low handrail on either side? She had put back her head and laughed at something he had said; and looking up at her he had felt not thought, how young she is, how clever she is, how beautiful my mother is. He had been no more than seven or eight, but of the truth of that part of the memory he had no doubt.

  The moment held him, wrapped and helpless, so that he had no energy to intervene. He listened as Irene spoke.

  'Oh, Mum Wilson, someone who is mad has to do it all alone. First, Polly Nicholls at the end of August, and then Annie Chapman on the eighth of September. That's what Jack the Ripper did – Billy Shanks wrote about it. And then at the end of September he killed another two women, I can't remember their names, but he killed them both in the one night. He just walked from one street to the other and did it again. Billy Shanks says that poor man they found dead in Deacon Street was like Polly Nicholls, and then there was John Merchant. So, you see, we only have to wait... If it happened again, and if two men died in the one night, then we would know. It would have to be someone who was mad then, wouldn't it?'

  It was a diversion and Murray was grateful for that.

  As they walked along the lobby, Peerse smiled above him. 'Odd marriage your brother has.'

  Murray opened the door and waited. He could not afford the luxury of anger.

  'We know he was there at the woman Fernie's flat,' Peerse said. 'I believe that bit. The taxi drivers confirm the times for the evening and the morning.'

  'Taxi?' Murray asked, taken by surprise.

  'He had a car in the garage, that's right, and he phoned instead for a taxi. And another in the morning – no buses for your brother.' Peerse sniffed. 'He offers reasons, of course, but I find it odd. It's almost as if someone wanted to make sure he could prove he was there.'

  Murder cases were littered with irrational behaviour – but so was daily life; and no one thought twice about it until something happened and policemen and lawyers arrived asking for things to be logical. Murray was too tired to try to explain any of that, and it wouldn't do any good to try. He said, 'He went to visit the wrong woman on the wrong night. He's not the first man to make that mistake.'

  Peerse gazed down on him speculatively. 'You were some kind of a policeman once. I wonder if you're as ignorant as you're pretending. He didn't go off to visit her on impulse – not off his own bat. If we can believe him, once Merchant got interested in her, he stopped seeing her. He's a careful fellow your brother. Hadn't seen her for months. According to his story, she phoned him that night. Said she was lonely and wanted him. He doesn't seem to be very good at resisting temptation. He went, they had intercourse…more than once – he felt he could be quite frank about that.'

  Murray stared at the closed door. He wondered if it had been Frances Fernie who had told Malcolm to take a taxi. Everyday life was a muddle; he believed in chance and accident. It was his job to listen, and most times when he heard people blame or congratulate themselves it seemed to him they were talking about their luck, the kind it was.

  For Frances Fernie, however, the coincidence had been extraordinarily convenient.

  18 Mary 0'Bannion

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 17TH 1988

  It took a lot of people a lot of years going down to wear down stone. These stone steps were worn down in the middle where Murray climbed. He had slept rough in the back entries of tenements like this. He had wakened in them cold and lonely when he made his fifteen year old boy's flight from the lighthouse to the city. Once, wakened with sunrise he had come out of a close where he had dozed on a couple of flattened cardboard boxes and found the tenements curving away like a wall of cliffs, golden in the honey-coloured morning light. People had brought up families in them, now the families were in high-rise flats or in harled semis on the vast desolate estates of the outskirts; it had been a city of tenements; what made it unique belonged to them. And the tenements were dying.

  This tenement in this street in the wasteland of Moirhill smelt of death.

  He gave no outward sign of hesitation as he climbed from one landing to the next. There was no nameplate on the door, but he had been told to expect that. He rapped with the side of his fist and it opened at once.

  'Hello, Mary,' he said.

  She was gross and from the darkness behind her drifted the sweet stench of unclean flesh. A fat smelly whore, Tommy Beltane had said.

  She yawned and turned back into the flat. The hall was narrow and her bulk rubbed the walls on either side. She eased herself out of sight and he glimpsed a lavatory bowl and then she pushed the door across, not bothering to close it. There seemed to be only one other door at the end of the lobby and he pushed gently so that it swung open, and after a moment stepped inside.

  Dirt crusted on the single window dimmed the light of the outer world. An electric bulb suspended at an angle from an overhead flex glimmered pallid yellow on the sink and cooker, on a chair draped with underwear, a table heaped with the remnants of meals. On its side an emptied bottle of vodka lay precariously near the edge. At first glance, it appeared a figure was lying on the bed, but it was only an accident of tangled blankets and his heartbeat slowed.

  As he listened for the lavatory to flush, she waddled through unannounced and settled into the chair, mumbling, 'You were lucky. I was going a place or I wouldn't have let you in.'

  She reached up a bottle from the floor and poured into a tumbler. As she sucked drink, her hand was unexpectedly
small against the sliding mounds of her lower face and neck.

  'For a pee,' she explained. 'I was going for a pee or you'd still be out there.'

  She was not pathetic but monstrous. He remembered the woman in the Crusader, a weapon – Big Mary – she hits you and you hit her – are you a man with a weapon?

  'Who sent you?' she asked and lifted the glass to her mouth again, cupping it in her little girl hands, rims of black showing under the fingernails. 'Should I know you?'

  When he did not answer, she laid down the glass and looked up at him. Her eyes were squeezed under heavy pale lids of oddly creamy flesh. She blinked and stretched her face down in a grimace that pulled her mouth into a gaping rectangle. As if the ugly movement had cleared her sight, she frowned at him. He had the impression it was the first time she had looked at him properly.

  'Did you say who it was sent you? I would remember you.'

  'Tommy sent me.'

  Her head lolled back to rest. 'Tommy? I don't know – don't even bloody know – anybody called Tommy.'

  Her eyes were almost closed. He glanced from the bottle among the debris on the table to the other one almost empty at her feet. It was impossible to tell – her head thrown back on the side rest of the chair – whether she had genuinely drifted off into a sleep. He winced at the thought of touching any part of that loose sprawl of evil-smelling obscenity.

  He had seen a woman built like this drink hard men under the table and show no effect. That much flesh could soak up a lot of alcohol.

  He wondered about using Tommy Beltane's full name to her; but, coldly, set that aside as being of no advantage. Instead, he said, 'What about Joe then? When is he coming? I'd like to talk to Joe.'

  The thin slices of eye under the heavy white lids widened and contracted in an instant. It was a reflex movement, the effect like the glare and narrowing of a cat's pupils.

  'You're not frightened,' she said. It was a local idiom, it implied – but you should be. 'I've got protection. I don't get fucked about.'

  'Joe wouldn't like it?'

  Instead of answering, she lifted the glass and tipped it into her mouth like a tiny bucket over a well.

  'Supposing,' he said, 'I told you I had a message for Joe?'

  Her breath wheezed in and out, a melancholy little tune as she thought about that. 'What message?'

  'You don't want to worry about that. Just tell me when he's going to be here. I'll give him it myself.'

  She hitched herself to the edge of the chair and struggled to rise. She used her arms to lift her weight and when she was half up he knocked the inside of one elbow. Lopsided she settled like a Zeppelin that had sprung a leak.

  She whistled curses.

  'There's no need to swear,' he said reasonably.

  For some reason, this seemed to astonish her. Eyes and mouth popped open. Given something puzzling, she went on overload, shorting all the circuits of her cunning.

  'I don't think you're all there,' she said.

  'That's just because you have a bad conscience.'

  Streams and ponds of sweat shone in the bread-coloured plains of her cheeks. 'You're from the police.'

  'I'm a detective,' he said carefully.

  'No – none of them would come here on their own. It would be two of them or more likely three.' She made it sound like a boast, and then another thought seemed to strike her, so forcefully that she blurted it out. 'That woman sent you. She was too frightened to come back so she's sent you.'

  His first reaction was to ignore this as a diversion, for he had been preparing the way to question her if she had ever heard Kujavia mention the name of John Merchant. He stared at her without expression, giving her no clue to his response.

  'You were stupid to come here, whatever she paid you,' she said. 'Joe nearly went mad when I told him about her coming here.'

  If it mattered that much to Kujavia, it was worth pursuing. Mary O'Bannion believed the mystery woman had sent him. That might be useful, but it created problems in questioning her.

  'She wasn't afraid,' he said contemptuously. 'You told her what she wanted to know. After that she didn't like the stink in here. It made her sick.'

  'She's a liar,' the fat woman wheezed. 'That blonde bitch ran like a wee scared rabbit. She thought I was going to keep her here. But she was too quick for me.' She brooded on her failure. 'If her hair had been longer, I'd have had a grip of her.'

  Small. Hair cut short. Young, it seemed, and blonde. Perhaps it was because he had been thinking of John Merchant, sometimes for Murray a spark would jump from fact to fact, person to person. I have the second sight, he had told a client once, and been amused when she took him seriously. Now he had an image of a young blonde woman sitting on the edge of a bed watching him tumble her clothes out on to the floor.

  Sometimes though it happened that the spark jumped the wrong way. When it did, he wasn't better than average at his trade, but a lot worse.

  'By that time, you'd told her what she wanted to know about Joe,' he said.

  'She didn't know anything about Joe,' the pursed lips spat out the words. 'Nothing. She knew nothing. She just knew about me because my name was in the papers. It was me that helped Father Hurtle with the children.'

  'Tell me about it.'

  'Ask her. If you're that anxious, ask her that sent you.'

  'That's not the idea, Mary. The idea is you tell me, and that lets us know if you tell the same story twice.'

  He tried to read the expression on her face but the drooping folds of flesh made a mask out of its abundance. After a moment, he saw to his astonishment a plump tear leak over the bottom lid of her left eye and run the downhill slalom of her cheek.

  'Poor wee things. Even if I didn't really like Annie,' she wheezed, 'those two wee ones were lovely. She was a cunt though and a right snob. I was dirt. I was ignorant. I'd never been anywhere. I couldn't even cook.' She made the last charge sound particularly venomous; whether because it had hurt most or out of a memory of how the woman Annie had spoken it was impossible to tell. 'I still haven't been anywhere. I never seen Belgium or Germany or anywhere. And I still can't cook. But I couldn't have been that bad at learning. For I'm still here and she's away.'

  And with the tear still drying she broke into a cracked cough that he took a moment to recognise as laughter.

  'But you looked after her children?' he wondered aloud. He frowned, trying to remember the name of the priest she had mentioned. 'You didn't like her, but you got Father Hurtle to arrange for them to be adopted?' It was an obvious guess.

  'God help them,' she cried falsely. 'Poor wee motherless things.

  Father got a good home for them.'

  'And you kept in touch?'

  'Eh?'

  'You took an interest in the children?'

  If he had thought the choice of phrase might flatter her, he was mistaken. Lady Bountiful farted and said, 'Father wouldn't tell anyone where they were going. And why would I care?'

  'Children grow up,' he said. 'They want to find out about their real mother. Adopted kids do that sometimes. They come looking.'

  With the effort of thought, the fat woman's mouth hung open and her tongue lolled out over the bottom lip. 'That wee blonde? One of the kids? Annie's daughter?' She gave the barking cough that parodied laughter. 'Annie thought she was a lady. Her girls were going to be ladies. That one was no fucking lady!'

  A young blonde woman staring at him from the edge of a bed.

  There was a simple way to discover if one of the children had grown up to be the woman calling herself Frances Fernie.

  'Up. On your feet.'

  Her only response was to let her great thighs sprawl apart. The smell of gin from a pub door snaring him in the bad time and the young policeman buying the bottle and taking it back to the empty room to be drunk in secret – never with anyone else for that would have been weakness. The smell that rose from her was unclean but spiced with the odours of the body's hidden places. A jungle smell, a taint of the swamp
, sick flowers of corruption that drugged the air and drew a man face down among them to die. Out of the dead past the smell drifted to him from the bodies of whores.

  'If you make me,' he said softly, 'I'll soil my hands on you. You can get up the easy way or the hard way.'

  As if there could be any easy way for her to hoist up that gross hill of flesh. She sighed and strained, heaved and was on her feet.

  'I'll need a coat.'

  There was one thrown across the chair by the bed near where he stood, but when he picked it up to pass to her he saw that it was ludicrously too small. It was a woman's coat, however, and he said to her, 'That's not yours. Does Joe wear it?' which was only a piece of mockery until he caught the look on her face. It was a cloth coat, dark green in colour, not new but of reasonable quality, the kind the better chain stores would sell. Holding it, he remembered what Barney the paper seller had told him, that Kujavia did this, cross-dressed for a disguise or some private satisfaction. It made him more grotesque, not less frightening; it had been hard to believe, thinking of that lumped white face, the smell of dirt. 'If he does,' Murray said almost to himself, 'he must be the ugliest woman in the world.'

  'Mine's ben the room,' she said, taking the coat from him and throwing it back across the chair.

  He followed her into the lobby. It was not surprising that he had overlooked the second door. Whatever colour it had once been had faded to a drab shadow in the darkest corner.

  'I'll get my coat,' she said, and opened the door.

  She was so wide that she blocked his sight of what might be in the room. It was only the noise that warned him. Scrabbling, clicking, nails on linoleum, a gusting of breath, the woman called out and as she squeezed to the side the dog writhed past her. The impact of its weight and the blow in his hand were felt as a single shock. By instinct he had thrown up an arm to guard his throat. He staggered under the hurled weight of the beast, managed to stay upright and, turning, got it pinned against the wall. Everything seemed to be happening with extraordinary slowness. Its hind legs would have torn him, but he held it upright locking his free hand around its throat and leaning into its belly with his knees. He shook his head at the woman, warning her not to interfere, showing his teeth at her like a dog, and without a weapon she hesitated waiting for him to be pulled down. There was only a little time, and yet everything in that time held still. A wolf's head all eyes, the dog glared its hate. His blood sprang out along its muzzle. Every part of his attention poured into the grip of his left hand, the weaker hand, but he tightened his grip and leaned his weight into the wall. Roughness of hair, cords of muscle writhing against him. The choked voice of its snarling trembled against his palm. It began to die but it was brave and a little mad from being locked up and it would not release its bite. Suddenly blood and clear snot came from its nostrils and its teeth ground on the bones of his hand in its last agony.