Authors: Derek Raymond
I picked up the phone and said: ‘If that Suarez/Carstairs autopsy report isn’t on my desk by the time I put this phone down, there’ll be a lot more bodies leaving for the morgue from this actual building.’
‘We’ve been on to them twice, we’re doing our best.’
I said: ‘It’s not good enough. Ring them again and tell them that I’m in charge of this case and that when I’m restless, I don’t bother with British Telecom, I arrive in person. They’ll know what you mean. Do it now and ring me back, you’ve got ten minutes, I’m timing you.’
I’ve cleaned the cooker and the fridge out as best I can and do most of our cooking now, then I bring it through to the sitting room where I sleep and we sit in front of the TV, which glitters silently because the tube suddenly went but its light’s nice, so is the dim electric fire. Then we settle down and talk, sometimes we go on all night. One night Betty said: ‘Haven’t you any man in your life, Dora? Someone who loves you and could help you?’
If only she knew! I stiffened with terror when she said that and felt myself fading as they say ghosts do at morning, so that Betty said: ‘You frighten me with that expression.’
‘What expression?’
‘In my village we used to say, she’s walking in someone’s shadow.’
‘What shadow?’
That was what I wanted to know.
Another night Betty said, waking suddenly in her chair: ‘Dora, are you there?’
‘I’m always here.’
‘Dora,’ she said, ‘what are you going to do?’
I had had a few whiskies and said, perhaps too sharply: ‘What do you mean, Betty, do?’
‘I meant, with the years you’ve got ahead of you.’
‘What years ahead of me?’ I said. I repeated it. ‘What years?’
‘You’re fifty-six years younger than I am.’
I said: ‘Betty, I’m much, much older already than you are, if you only knew.’
‘Oh Dora,’ she sighed, ‘how terrible that would be if it were true, because Reg and I never had children, I didn’t seem made for it, but
sweet, I know you could have been mine.’
‘I feel as though I were,’ I said. ‘I feel that at long last I’ve found harbour, so hold me close.’ But she was getting sleepy again and soon after we had kissed each other good night she turned aside in her chair and rested on its worn-out arm, her hat crooked on her head, her spectacles clasped lightly on her knees.
I remember that night I dreamed I could shit again without screaming in pain and then, having woken, fell asleep again and dreamed I was a bird in white; I opened my slender beak and it spoke tears. Then there was another event in the dream. Someone, a man, came running after me; but by then it was too late. It was over, and I was far away.
I stopped reading about Dora. A grey hand had fallen on me. I, too, felt dragged towards that grey arch through which Dora had disappeared; and blocks of me shifted about in my head; the weight of my ignorance pressed itself into me as new knowledge.
She had scribbled on a page apart:
Does a bird know why it’s shot? Each time I look at my body in the mirror I realise that we have no hours left to ourselves or each other. There have been times lately, while Betty was asleep in her chair, where I have gone into the bathroom and looked at my naked body. I wanted to scream at it each time I looked at it and I did scream.
I know I am very sick because the hospital had explained my state. They told me that they had a bed and that I should be admitted, but I told them that though I knew I had to go, that wasn’t the way I wanted to do it. However, here I am in great pain; I am in more pain than I can bear and he still menaces me and will find me; I must end it.
I had had enough, so I picked the phone up and got the morgue.
Some man the other end mumbled: ‘Suarez? Who she then?’
I said: ‘Today isn’t the metaphysics course for you, sweetheart – so just do your job and get your nose into your dockets.’
‘Oh God, more bleeding work,’ he said. He went off. In the end he came back and said: ‘87471 and 2? You mean those women from Kensington? Christ, they haven’t hardly been tagged yet.’
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘You’ve had plenty of time, three hours.’
‘Three hours?’ he yelled. ‘What do you think we are here, bleeding miracle workers?’
‘You’d better turn yourself into a miracle for your own sake,’ I said, ‘otherwise I’ll be over, and then there’ll be a miracle fewer in the world; now I mean it.’
‘Oh, come on, give us a chance, Sarge,’ the man down at the morgue said. ‘There’s like a waiting list here, you know.’ He sniggered. ‘We’ve got all these quiet people keep turning up here the whole time.’ He added: ‘But at least they don’t get on the blower screaming their head off the way you do.’
I said in a very low grey voice: ‘Get off the line. Put someone with a normal brain on.’
‘No point losing your rag,’ he said cheekily, ‘there’s no one but me here, the mob’s at lunch, I’m just minding the fridges, sorry.’
I said: ‘I shall be over in thirty minutes, and if that report isn’t waiting for me when I arrive, I shall tear someone’s head off, probably yours. Come to that, what’s your name anyway? Let’s see what makes you tick.’
He finally grasped the major point, that I was serious. ‘Veale.’
‘You sound like third footman to Satan the night hell was invented,’ I said. ‘Now pull your finger out with a loud pop – I want that file, I want action, and I want the whole lot now, now, now, not sometime next Thursday week, you berk.’
‘But where’s the fire?’ he bleated. ‘They’re not going anywhere – I can’t understand what the rush is.’
‘Thank God you’re not paid to understand what it is,’ I said, ‘but if you must know, the rush is so I can catch the bastard that did it – didn’t you know that that’s what detective sergeants are for?’
‘All right, all right, friend,’ he said, ‘now calm down – anyone’d think they were Marilyn Monroe the way you’re going on.’
‘Compared to you they were,’ I said, ‘and don’t ever tell me to calm down. Now get going while you’ve still got your ears on your head, otherwise I’ll likely find myself drawing twenty for murder, and you can guess who the corpse’ll be.’
‘It means changing the order in the arrival files,’ said Veale, ‘and that’s a terrible administrative problem, that is.’
‘It’s you that’s the terrible problem,’ I said, ‘not just your files.’
‘You people pull rank, you do,’ Veale said bitterly. ‘You coppers really feel your bloody oats.’
‘It must be spring coming on,’ I said.
I knew there would be no action at the morgue till after lunch, so I left the Factory and went over to see Frank Ballard; he only lived ten minutes away from it by motor. I found him in his wicker chair by his sitting-room window, lying back like a musician worn out after a concert.
He said: ‘Hullo, you look bothered. Sit down, what’s the matter?’
I said: ‘I badly want to talk to you.’
‘That’s good, I’m here to be talked to,’ he said. ‘Does me good, makes me feel useful.’ He added: ‘So they’ve taken you back at the Factory; I knew they would.’
‘Frank,’ I said, ‘I really care about this one, can I just talk to you about it for a minute?’
‘Carstairs/Suarez?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’m up to date,’ he said.
I said: ‘There seem to be features.’
‘Features?’
‘Suarez says herself she was very ill.’
‘How do you know? Are you clairvoyant?’
‘No. I searched the flat and found what she’d written.’
‘Did she say what was the matter with her?’
‘No.’
‘It’ll show up in the autopsy report.’
‘I know it will,’ I said, ‘when I finally get my hands on the bloody thing.’
‘Meantime, how are you looking at it?’
‘Right now through this Suarez exercise book she left; I only came on this morning and it’s all I’ve got for now.’ I added: ‘In it she records some of the conversations she had with the old lady, Mrs Carstairs. She was frightened of someone, Frank.’
‘Kevin Loftus was round just now and of course we started talking about it,’ said Ballard.
‘What did he have to say?’
‘He said you were looking for a nut who had a grievance, and that the difference between a normal man and a nut was that a grievance with a nut stops being a grievance, it becomes life and death, mostly death – and I agree with him.’
‘Yes, not bad,’ I said, ‘only where does it get us? He’s a nut, all right, but he went gloved, so he’s not a raver.’
Ballard said: ‘How bad was it?’
I said: ‘The lot. He wanked into her, drank her blood, shit on the floor. Here, look at the pictures.’ I bit something back in my throat; it was grief.
Ballard saw that. He said: ‘Axe murderer. You don’t get many of them. Assuming he knew what he was doing, it makes too much mess.’
‘Anyway, one thing’s sure,’ I said. ‘We can’t dig anything up on him. And yet I’ve a feeling it wasn’t first time round for him either.’
Ballard put the pictures down and said: ‘Motive. Anything at all occur to you?’
‘From reading Suarez, I’ve an idea he may have loved her,’ I said, and added: ‘It may even have been mutual – in their idea of what that means, of course.’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ Ballard said. He thought for a while and said: ‘Anything to suggest someone might have had a hold on her?’
‘Well, I’m not sure,’ I said, ‘that’s a very good question, Frank, and I just hope that the next card I turn up will give me part of the answer.’
Ballard said: ‘He seems to be a good climber.’
‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘we’re looking for a sporty type, like athletic.’ I added: ‘And how many young or youngish men with no form have we got like that living in the London area, always supposing that this is where he lives?’
‘You could call it a couple of million,’ Ballard said.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Makes it easy, doesn’t it?’
‘You’ll turn a corner and get on his track,’ Ballard said, ‘I know you.’
‘I’ll go on till I do.’
Ballard said: ‘Well, thank God they didn’t put a berk on it.’ He added: ‘You’re really personally distressed over this, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Somehow this is different.’
Ballard picked up one of the pictures of the bad side of Suarez’s face and said: ‘It’s one of the most appalling sights I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen all of it.’ He added: ‘And she must have been a pretty girl.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Is there anything you can think of that could help me at all, Frank? Shorten the track?’
‘Two things,’ he said. ‘I think it may have been a pretty boy who couldn’t screw her. Secondly, I don’t know why, but where I get a tingle is with this Roatta that Stevenson’s on, because that’s three violent sitting-room murders less than three hours apart in time and barely a mile in space, and that’s unusual even in the metropolitan area.’
‘Yes, I like it,’ I said, ‘seeing I’ve got nothing else to go on, and I was going to have a word with Stevenson anyway. Besides, we get on very well, which helps.’
‘Get that autopsy report. Talk to the pathologist.’
‘That’s where I’m going now.’ I looked at the time and stood up. ‘Christ, I must get going,’ I said, ‘they must have finished eating by now. Thanks, Frank – just talking to you about this has been ever such a help.’
‘I’ll have a go, too,’ said Ballard. He tapped his head: ‘From here.’ It was hard for him being a detective inspector and paralysed from the waist down. He said: ‘Keep in touch.’
‘I always do.’
‘Crap,’ said Ballard, ‘you just come running to Mum when you bruise your knee. Don’t worry, I’ll ring you at Poland Street the minute I hear something.’
‘Bye,’ I said. I let myself out.
I came away from Frank’s place and by chance found a small public garden by the river; I found a bench under a weeping ash and sat with Dora’s book in my hand for a time, thinking about what I so far knew of her and her vanished life, that dark flower.
Sitting there, I felt stabbed by the sadness which had descended on me in this case. I could tell Ballard had seen it in me just now; it was the first time I had felt so deeply over any case, and I didn’t know why.
I opened her cheap ruled book again.
Dora wrote in her short, angular hand:
Until my illness forced me to think, I was neither intelligent nor stupid by nature but quite a passive girl. Of course I attracted men, I was young, and I enjoyed going out. Having fun stopped me thinking about the misery of my childhood. Betty’s calling.
Later there was some writing to a school friend.
Adele, don’t you remember the evenings when I used to pass your dress shop on our corner when coming back from school? Don’t you remember how you used to invite me in to the back of the shop for tea? Don’t you remember how you said to me: ‘Courage, girl’ – for she knew I had terrible problems at home; she was one of the few people I told. ‘Have you ever known love?’ I asked her once, ‘because I never have, not yet.’ ‘Only once,’ you said, turning away. I don’t know why, but that was the moment when I thought to myself: ‘Only rotten things will happen to me.’
On another page:
I have always needed people because I had no home. What I had for a home was four rooms solid with violence – my father beating up my mother, my mother fighting back with the frying pan, my mother lying on the floor, blood on the floor, never any money. I tell you, school was paradise, compared. My father was Spanish, my mother Jewish from Poland. They were both refugees.
On another page she described how she had listened to a poet declaim his work in a crowded Soho pub one night when she was there with a man, which was why she had copied down from memory four lines of his that had struck her:
Tell how his gas was lost
His poor exhaust;
Remember he was fat but ran the race,
Was present in the war.
She said how after his recital he had gone round the pub for a handout, and how she had given a pound.
On the next page she had tried to draw Betty Carstairs dozing in her armchair, her head in its woollen hat lying back, her spectacles in her hand. She had written underneath it, ‘All my kisses, darling Betty, from your Dora.’