Ripped

by Frederic Lindsay

  First, he stood at attention like a little soldier and they bound his legs together working up from the ankles. They tied his wrists and then bound his elbows which for some reason alarmed him.

  Yet it was all in the script and at any moment of all that pain which was no great pain, and that absurdity and the humiliation which was at the same time real and unreal, he could have gone back to the little philosophical puzzle which had pleased him so much to consider: who was using whom?

  As it happened, he was too busy for that kind of thinking, and then Belle produced the knife and the script was torn up and the worst that he had ever been afraid of happened and the humiliation and the pain was nothing he had ever wished, being real and with nothing in it of make believe.

  When in Conference Room One, Chief Superintendent Frank O'Hara, head drooped forward as if brooding over the knotted arthritic knuckles of his big hands, argued that the second killing of the night was unlikely to have been done by a woman - what woman would risk going into that fucking place by herself? – Naturally, he knew nothing of what had happened between Constable Weyman and his partner.

  The news about the dead man was passed from beat to beat from just after one a.m. until it reached Constable Weyman about fifty minutes later. By radio, of course, he had heard about it earlier and he and his partner had been reporting on vehicular traffic since, but the kind of detail which is unofficial comes on foot. From the spot in Carnation Street where it had been found, it was no more than a twenty-minute walk along Barnes Street and round by Merse Street to the pavement outside Matt's Bar; but news about the condition of the body had travelled cater-corner like a game of linked hands where people met until it arrived at Constable Weyman.

  After he had heard, he went back across the street to where his partner was waiting.

  'He'd been tied up. There weren't any ropes on the body when it was found, but they could tell by the marks. That's three now.'

  They walked on slowly, more or less in step.

  'Marks?'

  'On his legs and arms. Where he'd been tied up.'

  'Oh.'

  'What marks were you thinking about? Were you wondering if Jill had cut off his prick. The second one had his prick cut off.'

  'No,' his partner said. 'Merchant had been mutilated, but he wasn't castrated. He'd been sexually abused – but not castrated.'

  Something in the tone of that irritated Weyman. 'I thought she'd cut it off him,' he said.

  'No. You should read the sheets.'

  'I read them.'

  They went through a close and checked along the back of the row of shops. There should have been an open court in the middle of this rectangle of tenements; instead, a hundred years ago for profit, another tenement had been built in the open space, and people still lived there although its windows everywhere faced walls and even at noon the light was shut out. Buildings like that were known as backlands. There weren't many of them left and they were all due for demolition. The squatters who lived in them paid no rent, but then they had no lighting or heating or water; they didn't pay rates either. Looking up in the dark, he saw the glimmer of a candle in a broken window. Some of the squatters were dangerous. All of them attracted predators. By stretching out, Weyman could touch with one hand the back of the shops and with the other the derelict backland. The place between was a narrow passage down which they followed the pale circles of torchlight. It was no place for two young people even if they were in uniform, not at two o'clock in the morning; not after a body had been found quarter of an hour's walk away – a man naked with rope burns on his ankles and wrists and his throat cut at last. Still with his ornaments though; she hadn't cut them off; he had been lucky that way. At the thought, Weyman smiled to himself. It was not much of a joke, but then it wasn't much of a smile either.

  Constable Weyman hated this beat and this section of this beat and having to cover it on this shift when it was as dark as hell. Most of all, he hated having to cover it with this partner. Not that it was her fault – any other woman would have been as bad. It was the Region's policy now the force was at full strength to put a presence back on the streets, constables on foot patrol; and with equal rights, women, who got the same pay, did the same job. He understood that; he was an intelligent man; intelligent enough, if he could hold on through this time, to go to university, fees paid by the force, get a degree, work his way up. He could make a success of a career in the police force. It was even possible he might discover a talent for detection. Certainly, he would make a first class administrator. All these hopes lay on the other side of what he had to do now.

  When the noise came, some things about it were certain: it was a yell that sounded once and stopped, it was human not animal, it was the deeper note of a man.

  'What's that, what's that?' he cried as their torches jiggled patterns on the enclosing walls.

  'I can't see anything,' his partner said. She was trying to squint between the boards that were nailed across the nearest window opening. Behind it, when families lived in the backlands, there would have been the front room of a room and kitchen.

  'I can't see anything. The light doesn't reach.'

  The torch held by her cheek threw shadows up across her face.

  It was like the trick children used at Halloween to frighten. 'We'd better go in and check.'

  'Don't be fucking stupid,' he whispered.

  Some things about the noise were uncertain, among these, whether it was a cry of fear or pain or anger, or whether whoever had made it was still in there.

  'Somebody might be hurt.'

  She moved along to the dark entrance and went inside assuming that he would follow. She must have realised that he was not at her back for he saw the indistinct shape behind the torch and was dazzled by its light on his face. As they stood, they heard feet on the stairs inside stumbling upwards.

  'There you are,' he whispered. 'He's gone.' He raised his voice. 'And get that bloody light out of my eyes.'

  For some reason, he kept the light of his own torch out of her face.

  'I'm going to have a look,' his partner said. 'Somebody might be hurt in there.'

  'Why are you so fucking stubborn?' His voice whispered anger. 'You heard – some old cunt fell over and got a fright. Now he's taken off.'

  'Maybe, and maybe somebody's hurt in there. Whoever ran away might have left somebody.' Left somebody hurt? Christ, left somebody waiting?

  'Are you coming?' she asked. She was stubborn.

  'You waste your fucking time, not me.'

  She went into the close and he was left alone. He listened to the knock of her feet on the stone floor of the passage. Faintly then, heard its note change on to wood as she entered the flat behind the boarded window. All of that seemed to take a long time through which he waited in a curious blankness of attention, though all the while straining eyes and ears; and then his partner was coming back and he heard her talking in the dark, not to him, and he knew how bad it was. A voice crackled answers and 'We've to wait here,' she told him. 'Till they come.' Her voice was stressed and thin, but there was something else there also as if her shock was waiting its time to turn to exhilaration. 'It's four killed now.'

  'I'd better look.'

  'If you like. I don't suppose it'll make any difference.'

  But he stepped round her. There was only one flat on the ground floor. Its entrance had been locked and boarded and broken in more than once. There was nothing to stop him going in. Since there was no hall, the room was immediately beyond the smashed door and he saw the body at once where it lay parallel to the far wall. One arm was stretched towards him with the palm up. The lid on the nearer eye had been cut away; on the other eye, the little flap hung back like a tiny scar pressed against the temple. A wide red stare watched him edge closer. The belly had been cut open and the sickening spillage gathered up and thrown across the left shoulder.

  There was the smell.

  The light trembled on an ugly mess between the legs. This ti
me some part of it had been cut off him.

  There was the stir of rats disturbed at feeding. It had not been the murderer's steps they had heard, but someone who had stumbled on this and fled.

  He recognised the dead man – a derelict called Old Danny who appeared in the district and vanished again according to some calendar of his own. In the spring, he had seen him one of a group of three on a bench near the social security office in Riverside Avenue. A woman and two men, lost drunks with the faces of idiot children. Later the bench had a scattering of beer cans under it, and the old man had it to himself, eyes shut, flat on his back, with his knees up so that it was only as you came closer you could see he had the fingers of one hand inside his fly rubbing himself. In that public place, the look on his face was naked in its privacy. Not on duty, you walked past, the sun was shining, it was the first day of the good weather that had lasted all summer long and you walked by a French restaurant and a dress shop and three girls were joking as they came down the steps of the library and one of them, in pale brown cotton skirt and jacket, was the most beautiful girl you had ever seen. You would never forget her, and she passed you without a glance, the golden girl, walking with her friends towards the bench on the corner.

  By the wall behind the door as he retreated, there was a scatter of clothes – Old Danny wore layers of coats – tangled in a worm cast like another corpse.

  All of it was terrible, but it was the wet little smear of flesh on the dead face that made it Constable Weyman's last night on the beat. His partner had been wrong.

  Going in to look made a difference.

  BOOK FOUR

  20 Mourning

  TUESDAY,OCTOBER 2ND 1988

  'Cold enough for you then?' Barney asked.

  'It's cold,' Murray agreed, and took the paper the old man gave him.

  'Bloody cold.' And grinned an old man's empty grin, cried, 'Terrible murders – la-atest!' and dropping back into normal pitch went on hoarsely, 'Like winter, i'n'tit? And it was summer yesterday. Nothing in this bloody country makes sense.'

  It didn't seem as bad as that to Murray, but it was true the wind had changed direction and overnight covered the city under a lid of low grey cloud. It might be that the long Indian summer was over at last.

  'You're getting rid of the papers fast enough.'

  'Two in a oner, but it takes two. Just a murder doesn't sell papers any more. We could do with two every night.'

  'You wouldn't have anybody left to buy one.'

  'There's a million buggers in this town. Plenty to spare. Kill two of them every night make no difference. Kill ten for me – kill as many as you like,' he offered malevolently. He coughed and spat; with a change of mood, added, 'But the old guy was a liberty. I mean he wasn't looking for trouble or wanting his hole. Just an old dosser.'

  'Could've been you, Barney.'

  'Away to hell!'

  Driving, Murray made a bargain with himself not to rub at the ache at the base of his skull until he had passed the canal bridge. The gesture had become automatic. He lost. After that, he came among neat little bungalows clinging to a slope so that the best of the front gardens had been turned into rockeries set with heather. Farther up, the houses took more space to themselves and at the top where the fat man lived there were walled gardens and glimpses of fruit trees.

  The fat man himself opened the door. 'What the hell do you want, you bastard?'

  He had been drinking, still held the glass trembling in his paw. His eyes were red with weeping and his cheeks had the high flush of a man getting ready to have a stroke.

  'Just a few questions. Nothing that'll take long. I know you're upset.'

  'This is a house of grief,' the fat man said. As if impressed by his own words, he released a plump tear from the corner of each eye. 'And you can fuck off.'

  Murray put a hand on the edge of the door and held it seemingly without any effort against the fat man's pressure. 'I can't do that, Leo. I'm working for Blair Heathers and he'd like you to answer a few questions.'

  Not at once, but slowly as he thought about it, the fat man stopped trying to close the door. Inside, the hall was square with a passage to one corner running through to the back of the house. There was a door on the right lying open.

  'Yes?' Murray asked and went in first.

  It was a big room but even so there was too much furniture in it. With sunlight through the bow windows, it might have seemed more inviting; on an afternoon when the weather had changed, it was bleak.

  The woman by the window was dressed in mourning.

  'Oh, Leo,' she said, 'put on the lights. I can't sit in the dark any longer.' She came forward. 'We've been sitting in the dark,' she explained.

  'It's not a friend,' the fat man Leo said.

  'Would you like coffee? A drink instead, perhaps? She was the perfect hostess.

  'For Christ's sake,' Leo snarled. 'Don't you listen? He's not anybody. He shouldn't be here.'

  He took her by the shoulder and propelled her out of the room.

  'Nice lady,' Murray said. 'She reminds me of your wife.'

  'That bitch,' Leo said, but not as if his heart was in it. He sat on the sofa, spilling from one cushion to the next, and held up his face wet with shameless tears. 'Why do you have to be like that? Ask your questions and leave me in peace.'

  'Your brother and you depended on Blair Heathers, and that –'

  'No. No way.' The fat man's cheeks quivered with the force of his denial. 'My brother didn't depend on anybody. He didn't need anybody. My brother was hard.'

  Murray stared down at him reflectively. 'Seventy per cent – call it just seventy per cent – of the work your firm does is for Heathers. Take that away and you don't have a business.'

  The fat man threw off glittering drops of tears and sweat as he shook his head.

  'You forget,' Murray reminded him, 'I went over the books for your wife.'

  'Stole them! So that shyster lawyer could get his hands on them. You cost me a fortune, you bastard.' But his heart wasn't in it.

  'You shouldn't have put things in her name.'

  'My brother was hard. I'm soft. What am I going to do now? He knew what to do. He knew what to do about everything.'

  Murray regarded him with distaste. 'I'm sorry about your brother. It was a bad way to go. You want whoever killed him to be caught –'

  'Her! Do you not read the papers? Jill the Ripper. Ripper. Christ!' He covered his eyes with his hand.

  Murray waited, but he seemed ready to shelter behind that hand indefinitely. 'Had anything happened in the business? Something he was worrying about?'

  'You say Blair sent you here?' The folds of his cheeks creased in bewilderment.

  'That's right.'

  'Blair's never had any complaints.'

  'Maybe things have changed now your brother isn't going to be around.' Murray watched the fat man quiver. 'How about John Merchant? Your brother was tied up with him, wasn't he?'

  'That was Blair's end,' the fat man said. He wiped his cheeks dry with the palms of his hands as he tried to think. 'I don't get any of this. What does Blair want?'

  'He's a good citizen. He's trying to find out who killed John Merchant – and your brother.'

  'All right. But where do you get off asking questions about the business?'

  'It's a funny coincidence,' Murray said. 'There's a million people in this city – and Jill chooses John Merchant and your brother. And they both did business with Heathers.'

  'I don't want to talk to you anymore.'

  'Crazy people – the ones who hear voices – kill strangers,' Murray explained. 'There isn't a reason why any of their victims should know one another.'

  'They might,' the fat man said argumentatively. 'What about

  those guys who kill prostitutes? Don't some of those women who get killed know one another?'

  'Being on the game together, that's possible. But it's not the pros who are getting killed this time – it's the clients,' Murray pointed out. 'Why
should the clients know one another? Do you think there's a lodge for poor creeps who have to pay for it in Moirhill?'

  'My brother – ' Goaded, the fat man struggled to find the right words while Murray waited interestedly. 'My brother wasn't like that.'

  'He didn't go with whores?’

  'He didn't have to pay for it.'

  'What about amateurs? Did he pick women up?' Disdaining to reply, the fat man sneered instead.

  'Maybe he had special tastes?' Murray wondered. 'He wasn't married, was he?'

  'There was nothing wrong – not with my brother.'

  The pain sounded real enough. As Murray studied him, the fat man tried to hold his glance until he began to weep, heavy shuddering gasps that got worse as he fought to control them.

  'My brother was hard,' he sobbed, 'he crawled to nobody. What does it matter if he knew John Merchant? That old tramp didn't know John Merchant. Neither did the first guy who was killed.' He wiped at his cheeks with an oddly child-like gesture. 'I don't believe Blair sent you here.'

  Murray frowned. 'The first guy? The one that was found in the lane off Deacon Street? What do you mean he didn't know Merchant? He's never been identified – they don't know who he is.'

  'Oh, yes, they do. You can ask them yourself.'

  'Ask who?'

  'The police,' and saw something in Murray's face that made him smirk through his tears, 'they're coming here this morning. I've made a list for them – people my brother knew, friends, business, anybody I can think of. That's why they're sending someone.'

  It was time to go.

  Outside a car engine roared briefly and was cut off. Doors banged on either side of the silence. It did not have to be the police. At a time like this, people called, old friends, relatives, wanting to commiserate.

  As the fat man had pointed out, this was a house of grief.

  21 The Risks they Run

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 2ND 1988

  'That was cheeky.'

  Detective Chief Superintendent Jackie McKellar had taken over the Jill case from Standers after the death of John Merchant. Standing in front of his desk since he had not been invited to sit down, Murray was in the process of deciding that he disliked the man intensely. He stared at the place where the scalp of the Chief Superintendent shone pink through the wispy grey hair. In the situation he found himself in, concentration on that kind of detail sometimes helped.