The room was bright after the darkness of the stairway and it took a moment or two for my eyes to adjust. When they did, I saw two other men and a girl in the room. Two live men and one very dead girl.
Both men were white. One was bigger even than the heavyweight. But on him the muscle had turned to fat. He was bald on top but he had swept what hair he did have over his scalp. He had grown long sideburns to compensate. He wore a plain white shirt and black flared trousers. I liked him for his cheek. Lionel Blairs indeed!
His big belly strained the buttons of his shirt and bulged over the waist band of his trousers. He was sitting on the ledge of an open window as far away from the dead body as possible. He was holding a handkerchief over his nose.
The other man was smaller, blonde, wearing a baggy grey suit with a black shirt and narrow white leather tie. He was holding a sawn-off shotgun in his hand. It was pointed at me. It was short and stubby, double-barrelled with black insulating tape stuck round the barrels for a firm hold. The stock had been cut down into a pistol grip. All in all it was a very impressive weapon.
Deadly at short range in an enclosed space such as the room we were in, but at long range about as effective as spit-balls.
‘How sweet!’ I said to the blonde. ‘Only one little gun between the three of you, and today's your day to hold it. Do tell boys. Whose turn is it to have the flicknife?’
I must confess that levity was probably not wise under the circumstances, with the shotgun pointed at my belt buckle. But I've always tended to run off at the mouth when danger looms. I think it must be some kind of nervous reaction.
Blondie gestured with the gun. ‘Shut your mouth,’ he snarled.
I shut my mouth and looked around the ratty room. The terrible fetid odour came from the body of a young girl sitting stiffly in an old armchair by the back wall of the room. She was wearing a dirty white dress, like a shroud. By contrast, her skin had turned dark in death. A shock of dull blonde hair covered her head. Even with her face contorted in the rictus of death, I knew she wasn't Patsy Bright.
‘We're glad you're so prompt,’ said the blonde. ‘It was getting a bit close in here.’
I looked over at Flared Trousers.
‘Let's get this over with,’ he said through the handkerchief, ‘and get the fuck out of here.’
‘You've wanted a junkie,’ the blonde said. ‘Well here's one. We hope you'll be very happy together.’
‘I'm looking for someone,’ I said. ‘But I don't want to get involved in a bring and buy sale. This isn't Patsy Bright and you know it.’
‘Don't move, or I'll shoot,’ said the blonde.
I looked behind me at the heavyweight who grinned at me, but not too convincingly. Down below in the house I heard a door slam and footsteps start slowly up the stairs.
‘You'll hit your mate if you do,’ I said.
The blonde moved towards me and stuck the shotgun into my groin.
‘I'll blow your fucking balls off if you're not careful.’
I knew he meant it. He was one of those people who just didn't care. The most frightening you can meet. They're polite to women and will bounce little babies on their knees. But come to the crunch and they'll top you without a qualm and then go home and have their dinner as though nothing has happened. As far as they're concerned nothing has.
There are only two kinds of people in the world to them, their own and the rest. If you were one of the rest, woe betide your chances of surviving a ruck.
‘Listen, girls,’ I said, ‘this is fun, but I've got things to do. So why don't you tell me exactly what you want.’
The blonde spoke very softly and clearly as if to a backward child. ‘We want you to get your nose out of things that don't concern you. We want you to mind your own business. And we're going to make sure you do. We're going to kill you.’
He emphasised each point by poking me in the groin with the gun. The footsteps on the stairs got closer. Heavyweight leant back against the door.
‘What's all this about?’ I gestured to the dead girl.
‘Well, cunt,’ the blonde replied, ‘we want to leave you here with her for when the filth arrive. It'll be a touching scene. You and your girlfriend in Hell.’
‘You really should cancel your subscription to “Boy's Own Crime Club”,’ I said. ‘All that florid reading is going to your head.’
He drew his fist back and punched me on the side of the jaw.
I should have known better than to criticise another man's literary taste. My head snapped around and blood filled my mouth. I began to sweat and the smell from the dead body seemed to be getting worse.
With my peripheral vision I saw the drug paraphernalia on the floor by the dead girl. And I noticed for the first time that there was a syringe clasped in her hand.
The footsteps stopped on the landing outside the room. I shook my head to clear the dizziness I felt. I turned towards the heavyweight and as I did so, I sensed the blonde lift the shotgun above his head. I heard the gun displace the air above my head. Suddenly I felt a terrible pain, and then all the lights went out.
It was worse than a dozen hangovers. I felt myself falling into a black ocean from which I was convinced with my last ounce of consciousness that I would never emerge again.
Then I felt nothing.
I slowly drifted in and out of a dream.
At first I thought I was lying in bed next to my wife and daughter on one of those happy days we'd had together.
I reached out to keep them safe, but they kept moving further away from me. The bed in my fantasy was hard and unyielding. As I came fully awake, I know I whispered their names.
I found myself sprawled face down on a piece of stinking carpet. What I'd imagined to be the sound of Laura's voice was in fact a man asking if I was alright. I forced open my eyes and found myself staring at a pair of official issue police boots.
I dragged myself, complaining bitterly, back into the real world. ‘He's awake, I think,’ said the uniformed policeman squatting at my side.
Then to make sure, he caught my right earlobe between two fingers nails and twisted it hard.
That's the kind of thing they teach you in today's police force.
‘Alright,’ I said through the pain. ‘Leave it alone.’
I tried to sit up, but the agony in my head was too much. Not only could I still feel the remains of my hangover, but my jaw was swollen and the blow from the gun barrel had ripped the skin open in a long shallow wound. It had raised a huge bump on the back of my skull.
Finally, some clown had torn off half my ear.
I touched the back of my neck gingerly. Blood had congealed thickly in my hair. I felt a mess. It was not time to meet new people. I tried to speak again but my mouth was dry. It tasted of blood and my tongue was swollen and sticking to the roof of my mouth.
I felt as though I needed a month on a health farm.
The smell in the room was appalling. I moved my head round with difficulty and two police constables swung into my line of vision. One was trying to help me into a sitting position. The other was staring with sick fascination at the body in the chair. He looked as though he felt that it might suddenly jump up and bite him. There was no sign of the other three recent occupants of the room.
I felt the remains of the previous night's vodka and this morning's full English breakfast rise into my throat.
‘Fresh air,’ I choked. ‘I need fresh air.’
‘Don't let that bleeder go,’ said the copper by the body.
‘He won't go far,’ said the other.
‘I've got to get out of here,’ I said, trying to pull myself onto my feet.
The first policeman helped me up and led me out of the room and onto the landing. He held me firmly by the arm and propelled me toward the window. He forced the ill fitting pane up in its frame. I leant out and breathed the fresh air.
Normally it smelled foul, but now it tasted clean and helped to clear my head. I immediately started to feel better.
‘Christ!’ I said weakly. ‘I feel like being sick.’
In the distance I could hear the sound of a siren coming closer.
‘Ambulance, Phil,’ the officer holding me said, turning towards the open door without loosening his grip on me.
‘They can turn that fucking row off. There's no hurry now,’ said the other officer from within the room.
‘You get in the corner, out of the way. And don't move,’ said my policeman to me.
I nodded and let him lead me across the landing again. I slumped down and leant my head against the banisters trying to will some strength back into my body.
The copper towered over me and said, ‘Looks like you fucked up here mate.’
I didn't bother to reply. Just asked, ‘Got any water?’
He looked into the room containing the dead girl.
‘Phil. Get a drop of water, will you?’
‘This is not a bloody cafe,’ came the reply.
‘Do me a favour,’ I whined.
‘Come on, Phil,’ he said again.
In a moment, Phil, as I now knew his name to be, appeared with a mug of water. I grabbed it and greedily drank some even though the cup was none too clean. Normally I'm fussy that way.
I suddenly heard the door of the house burst open and heavy footsteps began to climb the stairs. The sound brought everything back to me. I started to shake. Not so bad that anyone would notice, but bad enough.
‘Keep him out of the way, John,’ said Phil. ‘And you'd better cuff him just to be on the safe side.’
‘You're not arresting me, are you?’ I asked.
‘Cuff the fucker, John,’ repeated Phil, then turned to me and said ‘Don't be so fucking previous son. There's a dead body in there.’
He gestured into the room. ‘What do you think we're going to do? Call you a mini-cab to run you home?’
I drank the last of the water and allowed myself to be hand-cuffed. At least they weren't being rough with me.
The footsteps turned out to belong to two ambulancemen who had come to collect the overdose case.
The ambulancemen stood around waiting for the police doctor to arrive.
He turned up a few minutes after them.
At the same time two detectives and the forensic crew arrived. Both the plainclothes men were unknown to me.
The doctor appeared to be about two hundred years old and took all day to climb the stairs.
Everyone waited with varying degrees of patience. One of the ambulancemen chewed on his nails and the taller of the detectives stared at me as if I was an exhibit in the zoo.
That's one thing you get used to at the scene-of-the-crime, waiting.
The doctor didn't take long to examine the body. A blind man with a good sense of smell could have told him the girl was dead. He mumbled softly to the detectives as he peeled off his rubber gloves. He left as slowly as he had come. Only when I heard the front door slam behind him did it occur to me that I should have had him look at the wound on my head.
I remained cuffed up in the corner of the landing as the ambulancemen went about their grizzly business. They moaned that the body was too stiff to lie on a stretcher and had to be back for a wheelchair, cursing and complaining as they went.
The silver buttons stayed with me whilst the detectives began tagging and bagging the few belongings in the room.
Finally they got round to tagging and bagging me.
They dismissed the uniformed officers with a curt order that they completed their reports immediately, and then introduced themselves as Detective Sergeant Bachman and Detective Constable King.
They came across as a real class act. Something told me they fancied themselves as a pair of snappy dressers.
Bachman was tall, wearing a ratty windcheater over a grubby T-shirt. He favoured elephant cord pants that finished an inch or so above his Adidas sneakers.
King was a tub of lard with a beard. He obviously owned a charge card at C&A. He was all dolled up in an obnoxious light tan leather jacket, a predominantly red shirt and powder blue slacks.
They'd got their sartorial shit together splendidly, looking like a pair of professional darts players out on a spree, but came across as the toughest pair of dudes outside re-runs of ‘The Sweeney’.
Bachman hauled me to my feet and stood staring closely into my face as I leaned against the wall.
‘Now my friend,’ said King, playing the good cop. ‘Who are you? What are you? And why did you kill the girl?’
I think with his soft tone that he expected an immediate confession and for me to cry buckets onto the shoulder of his leather jacket.
No such luck.
I painstakingly told the whole story, beginning with the visit from George Bright, through to the heavyweight's phone call and ending when I woke up lying on the carpet. My name seemed to mean little to them.
‘Do you expect us to believe that bullshit?’ asked Bachman, when I'd finished. ‘You topped the girl, and that's that.’
‘Jesus!’ I said, holding out my cuffed wrists in front of me. ‘It's a fair cop. I'll come quietly, guilty as charged. Are you blind? I just got here, and she's been dead at least three days. Didn't the doc tell you?’
‘That doesn't mean that you weren't around when she died,’ said Bachman. ‘And how come you're an expert on how long she's been dead? Unless you were here that is.’
‘It's obvious,’ I replied. ‘Have you got no sense of smell? And if I were here, what did I do? Hit myself on the back of the head and wait for you to arrive? How come you're here anyway? Who called you?’
‘A tip from an informant,’ said Bachman.
‘I'll bet,’ I said. ‘And when did you get it? Last Thursday?’
Whilst we'd been enjoying the witty backchat together, King had been absent-mindedly going through my pockets.
I thought he'd find my car keys and very little else.
But inevitably, he pulled out an envelope from my hip pocket. ‘What have we here?’ he asked.
I could hardly wait.
He opened the envelope and tipped a number of little oblong paper packets into his hand. He returned all but one to the envelope which he stashed in his pocket. He carefully unfolded the remaining wrap which contained a small quantity of brownish-white powder. He wet his forefinger with his tongue and dipped it gently into the powder. He tasted the residue and pulled a face.
‘Don't tell me,’ I said. ‘Horlicks.’
‘Scag,’ he said, and refolded the wrap and tucked in into his pocket with the envelope.
‘You naughty boy,’ said Bachman. ‘You're nicked.’
The rest of my pockets revealed no surprises. Just the car keys as expected.
‘Check the shirt pockets,’ I said. ‘Anything there?’
‘Nothing,’ said King.
So the heavyweight had lifted his fifty quid!
‘You travel light,’ said Bachman. ‘Just some dope for those precious solitary moments.’
I didn't bother to reply.
Bachman started to get heavy. He pushed me across the banisters until I thought my back would break.
‘That hurts a bit,’ I said through clenched teeth.
He suddenly slapped me hard on the right side of my face with his open palm.
‘I remember you now,’ he said, ‘you didn't say you were an ex-copper. The blue eyed boy who went bad. I thought I recognised you earlier. Sharman. That's right, and you're up to your old tricks again.’
I declined to mention that my eyes were brown.
‘You ever hit me again like that, you'll regret it,’ I said.
He hit me again. Harder with his clenched fist. Perhaps he did regret it, but certainly not as much as I did.
‘We'll meet again,’ I said.
‘I'm shaking right down to the tips of my toes,’ he replied.
‘Bachman,’ said King. ‘Let's take him to the station. His head needs looking at.’
I tended to agree, but not necessarily in the way he meant.
I must have been crazy to get into that situation. However, King was correct. The force of the fresh blows had made the bleeding start again, both inside my mouth and on the back of my head. I could feel the warm stickiness running down my neck and mouth filled with blood. I spat a mouthful onto the floorboards, close to Bachman's foot. He scowled at me but said nothing. Suddenly I felt like crying. I wasn't half as tough as I liked to think I was.
King still held my car keys. Bachman looked at them and noticed the fancy key ring.
‘Do you drive a flash black Jaguar?’ he asked, a big smile spreading across his ugly face.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘Not any more, you don't,’ he said gleefully. ‘You larey git.’
I didn't know what to expect as they took me downstairs. King holding on to my arm so that I wouldn't fall, cuffed and groggy as I was.